The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot

Arthur Edward Waite, a scholar of the occult and a member of the Golden Dawn, wanted a tarot deck that carried his reading of the symbols, and he hired Pamela Colman Smith, an illustrator, stage designer, and fellow member of the order, to draw it. She made all seventy-eight cards in roughly six months in 1909 for a flat fee, and William Rider & Son published it in London that December. Waite's companion book, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, followed in 1910.

The deck did something no widely sold deck had done before: every one of the fifty-six minor cards got a full scene, not just a count of cups or swords. Smith had seen photographs of the Sola Busca tarot, a hand-colored Italian deck from the 1490s with pictured minors, on display at the British Museum, and a few of her cards answer it directly, most visibly the Three of Swords. The rest she invented, and those inventions, the Eight of Cups walking away, the Ten of Swords face down at dawn, the Nine of Swords sitting up in bed, became the shared visual language of tarot for the next century. Nearly every deck made since either follows her scenes or argues with them.

Smith signed each card with a small monogram, received little money and less credit, and died in Cornwall in 1951. For most of the twentieth century the deck was sold as the Rider-Waite. It is now usually called the Rider-Waite-Smith, which is the least that can be done. The scans here are of an early printing, cream stock and rounded corners included.