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Liber VII · Divination

Liber VII · Divination · Chapter XIII: Tarot History

The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot: History of the 1909 Deck

The Rider-Waite-Smith tarot of 1909: how A. E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith made the most influential tarot deck, its symbolism, editions and legacy.

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The Rider-Waite-Smith tarot is the 78-card deck published in London in December 1909 by William Rider & Son, designed by the occult writer Arthur Edward Waite and drawn by the artist Pamela Colman Smith. Its fully illustrated minor arcana, its reworked trumps and its long commercial life made it the template for most tarot decks produced in the English-speaking world since the 1970s.

The Tarot Before 1909§

The tarot began in fifteenth-century northern Italy as a card game with a set of allegorical trumps added to the four suits, and for most of its history it was played rather than read. The standard pattern of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Tarot de Marseille, showed its trumps as simple woodcut figures and its numbered suit cards as geometric arrangements of cups, coins, swords and batons. The longer story is told in our history of tarot.

The occult interpretation of the cards began in Paris in 1781 with Antoine Court de Gébelin, who claimed they preserved Egyptian wisdom, and was developed by the cartomancer Etteilla and then by Éliphas Lévi, who linked the 22 trumps to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. In late Victorian London the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn built these ideas into an elaborate system of correspondences between the trumps, the paths of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, the planets and the signs of the zodiac. Members copied their own decks by hand, and no affordable printed deck in England expressed the system.

Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Colman Smith§

Arthur Edward Waite (1857–1942) was a prolific writer on mysticism, alchemy, Rosicrucianism and ceremonial magic, and the translator of Lévi into English. After the Golden Dawn split in 1903 he led one of its successor bodies, steering it towards a Christian mystical interpretation and away from practical magic. For Waite the tarot was a book of symbols pointing to the soul's ascent, related in his view to the legends of the Holy Grail; he was also a member of an oath-bound order and wrote that he could not reveal everything he knew. That tension, between disclosure and concealment, runs through his writing on the cards.

Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951) was born in London to American parents, spent part of her childhood in Jamaica, and studied art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She worked in the theatre world around Ellen Terry and Henry Irving's Lyceum company, illustrated books, edited a small magazine called The Green Sheaf, and painted pictures she said came to her while listening to music. In 1907 Alfred Stieglitz exhibited her work at his New York gallery, the first exhibition of paintings and drawings there rather than photographs. She joined the Golden Dawn in 1901 and followed Waite's branch after the split.

Waite commissioned her to design the deck around 1909. The division of labour is not entirely clear. Waite appears to have specified the trumps in some detail, while the 56 minor arcana seem to have been largely Smith's own invention within the meanings he provided. The work took only months, and Smith was paid a flat fee, without royalties from what became one of the best-selling card decks in history. She died in Bude, Cornwall, in 1951 with few possessions.

Innovations in the Major and Minor Arcana§

The trumps§

Waite and Smith kept the traditional subjects of the 22 trumps but redesigned many of them. The Fool, a vagabond in older decks, became a young traveller stepping towards a cliff edge with a white rose and a small dog. The Magician stands before a table bearing the four suit emblems, with a lemniscate, the figure-of-eight sign of infinity, over his head. The High Priestess sits between pillars marked B and J, the pillars of Solomon's Temple, holding a scroll labelled TORA. The Lovers ceased to be a betrothal scene and became Adam and Eve beneath an angel, and the Wheel of Fortune was surrounded by the four living creatures of Ezekiel and the Book of Revelation, with the letters of TARO and the Hebrew name of God on its rim.

The most discussed change concerns numbering. In the Marseille order Justice is VIII and Strength is XI. The Golden Dawn had attached Strength to Leo and Justice to Libra, and to keep the zodiacal sequence along the Tree of Life the two had to change places. Waite adopted the switch, so Strength is VIII and Justice XI in his deck, without fully explaining why in print. Most decks descended from his follow him; most decks in the Marseille tradition do not. The trumps as a series are described in our guide to the major arcana.

The scenic pip cards§

The deck's decisive novelty was its minor arcana. Instead of six cups in a pattern, the Six of Cups shows children in a village courtyard exchanging flowers; the Three of Swords shows a heart pierced by three blades under rain; the Ten of Swords shows a man lying face down with ten swords in his back. Every numbered card became a small scene that a reader could interpret from the picture alone, without memorising a list of meanings.

The idea was not completely new. The Sola Busca tarot, an Italian deck of the 1490s, had illustrated its numbered cards, and photographs of it were deposited at the British Museum in 1907. Several of Smith's designs, including the Three and Ten of Swords, are close enough to Sola Busca compositions that most historians accept she saw them. The guide to the minor arcana explains how the four suits were read before and after this change.

The Pictorial Key and Waite's Meanings§

The cards were sold with a short guide, The Key to the Tarot, which Waite expanded into The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, illustrated with black-and-white reproductions of Smith's designs and published in 1910 (some copies are dated 1911). The book has three parts: a historical sketch, in which Waite rejected the theory of an Egyptian origin and dismissed several earlier occult claims; a description of each trump with its "higher" symbolic sense; and a list of divinatory meanings for all 78 cards, upright and reversed, with a few sample spreads.

The divinatory meanings owe a good deal to French cartomancy, especially to the tradition of Etteilla, and they are often terse lists of words. Waite also published a ten-card arrangement he called "an ancient Celtic method of divination." No earlier source for the Celtic Cross spread under that name has been identified, and it is usually regarded as a Golden Dawn-era or Waite-era construction; it nonetheless became the best-known tarot spread in the world.

Waite was deliberately reticent about his sources. He wrote that the symbols carried a deeper sense that he would not fully set down, and he gave the Golden Dawn's planetary and zodiacal attributions only indirectly. This reticence left room for later writers, from Paul Foster Case to many contemporary authors, to supply Kabbalistic and astrological correspondences of their own. A different response to the same Golden Dawn material produced Aleister Crowley's Thoth deck, discussed in our article on tarot and Qabalah in Thelema.

The first printings of 1909 were lithographed in flat colours. Collectors distinguish editions by the card backs, colouring and titles, using informal labels such as "Pam-A" for the earliest English printings. The original artwork has not survived, so all later editions descend from printed cards.

Its mass popularity came later. In 1971 the American publisher U.S. Games Systems, under Stuart R. Kaplan, issued an edition under the name "Rider-Waite Tarot," and the counterculture's interest in astrology and divination carried it into bookshops worldwide. U.S. Games has claimed copyright in its own recoloured edition, but the 1909 images themselves are in the public domain in the United States, and in the United Kingdom and European Union Smith's work entered the public domain at the start of 2022, seventy years after her death. This is why so many free and commercial reproductions of the original designs now exist.

Influence and the Recognition of Pamela Colman Smith§

Most tarot decks published since the 1970s are variations on the Waite-Smith pattern: scenic pips, Strength at VIII, a Fool on a cliff edge, a Death card with an armoured rider. The meanings readers learn today are, in large part, Waite's adaptations of French cartomancy as pictured by Smith.

For decades Smith was a footnote: the name on the box was "Rider" (the publisher) and "Waite" (the author). From the late twentieth century scholars, collectors and readers began to recover her career as a painter, illustrator and storyteller, and the centenary of the deck in 2009 encouraged a wider reassessment. The names "Smith-Waite" and "Waite-Smith" are now common in scholarly and specialist writing. Historians such as Michael Dummett and Ronald Decker have shown how much of its symbolism belongs to Edwardian occultism rather than to any ancient tradition.

Frequently asked questions§

Who drew the Rider-Waite tarot cards?§

All 78 images were designed by the artist Pamela Colman Smith in 1909, working from instructions by A. E. Waite. Her monogram appears on many of the cards. "Rider" is the name of the London publisher, William Rider & Son, not of a designer.

Why are Strength and Justice switched in the Rider-Waite deck?§

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn linked Strength to Leo and Justice to Libra. To keep the zodiac in order along its scheme, Strength had to come before Justice, so Waite numbered Strength VIII and Justice XI, reversing the Tarot de Marseille order.

Is the Rider-Waite tarot in the public domain?§

The original 1909 images are in the public domain in the United States and, since 2022, in the United Kingdom and the European Union. Particular modern editions with new colouring or design may still be protected, so the status of a given reproduction depends on its source.

Is the Celtic Cross spread ancient?§

Despite Waite's description of it as an ancient Celtic method, there is no known earlier source for it. Historians generally treat it as a late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century invention associated with the Golden Dawn milieu and popularised by The Pictorial Key to the Tarot.

Sources and further reading§