The Rider-Waite-Smith deck

What it is

The tarot deck published in London by William Rider & Son in December 1909, conceived by Arthur Edward Waite and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith.

It is the most influential deck ever made and by a wide margin the most copied. When someone pictures the Death card, the Tower struck by lightning, the Fool stepping off a cliff, or the Three of Swords piercing a heart, they are picturing Smith's drawings — including when they are looking at one of the thousands of modern decks that reinterpret her compositions.

Where it came from

Both creators were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the deck encodes the order's correspondences — the Kabbalistic and astrological attributions that Éliphas Lévi and the Golden Dawn had developed over the previous sixty years.

Waite was an occult scholar and prolific author who had already published on Kabbalah, alchemy and Rosicrucianism. He directed the project and wrote the accompanying Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910).

Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951) drew all 78 cards, apparently in about six months. Born in London to American parents and raised partly in Jamaica and partly in the United States, she trained at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, worked as an illustrator, stage designer and storyteller, ran a small magazine, and moved in artistic and theatrical circles — she had worked with the Lyceum Theatre company and was acquainted with W.B. Yeats, who likely brought her into the Golden Dawn.

How it is read

The innovation that made it dominate is easy to miss and structurally decisive: Smith illustrated the minor arcana with full narrative scenes.

Before 1909, the pip cards in tarot decks were arranged suit symbols — five cups, eight coins — exactly like the number cards in an ordinary playing deck. Reading them meant memorising an abstract meaning for each, which is difficult and puts the practice beyond casual use.

Smith gave every one of the 56 minor cards a picture with people, action and setting. A man hunched over five coins outside a lit window. Three figures raising cups. A figure walking away from eight cups in the dark. That change is the reason tarot reading became something anyone could attempt: the cards now tell you something before you have learned anything.

There was a precedent, and Smith almost certainly knew it. The Sola Busca deck, an Italian deck of around 1491, had illustrated pips, and photographs of it were acquired by the British Museum in 1907 — two years before she began. Several of her cards echo Sola Busca compositions closely enough that the debt is generally accepted.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the imagery is Smith's to a degree the deck's name concealed for most of a century. Waite gave detailed direction on the trumps; by most accounts he gave far less on the minors, and the narrative scenes that made the deck what it is appear to be substantially her invention.

We can say she was badly treated, and that this is documented rather than inferred. She was paid a flat fee — small, by every account — with no royalties on a deck that has sold continuously for over a century. Her name did not appear on the box. The deck was universally called the "Rider-Waite" until the late twentieth century, when "Smith" began to be added, and many editions still omit her.

Her later life was difficult. She converted to Catholicism, moved to Cornwall, ran a holiday home for priests, and died in 1951 in financial hardship. Her possessions were sold to settle debts, and she was buried in an unmarked grave.

We can say the copyright position explains the ubiquity. The original artwork has entered the public domain in most jurisdictions, so the images can be reproduced and adapted freely — which is why the visual language of tarot worldwide is that of one deck rather than many.

We can say this matters for how the tradition presents itself. Tarot is frequently described as carrying immemorial symbolism. The symbols nearly everyone actually uses were drawn by a thirty-one-year-old illustrator in London in 1909, working fast, for a fee, partly from an Italian deck she had seen photographs of at the British Museum two years earlier.

We cannot say how she understood the work. She left little about it, and what survives suggests she regarded it as one commission among many in a career that never brought her security.

Further reading

• A.E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) — the accompanying text, and notably reticent about Smith.
• Stuart Kaplan et al., Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story (2018) — the major work of recovery on her life and art.