Cards - Rider-Waite-Smith tarot (Rider)

Rider-Waite-Smith tarot. Rider, United Kingdom. Full divinatory tarot deck, Latin suited, 78 cards. Size: 70mm x 120mm approx.

Deck make-up:
Trumps: 0-21.
Pentacles (i.e. coins), wands (i.e. clubs), cups, swords: A, 2-10, foot jack ("page"), mounted jack ("knight"), queen, king.

The Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck has become the best-selling – and most emulated – tarot deck in the world since its launch by the William Rider & Son company in 1909. The cards were masterminded and overseen by mystic writer Arthur Edward Waite, and drawn ("a big job for very little cash") by struggling London-based illustrator Pamela Colman Smith.

London-based Waite considered previous attempts at divinatory tarot decks to be botched, and so set about overseeing the design of what he called an "updated and rectified" tarot. The Christian imagery of previous decks' cards was toned down following a trend that had started sporadically around 1760: the Pope card became the Hierophant (a term presumably intended as non-denominational), and the Popess became the High Priestess. The pip cards were each illustrated with a bespoke image by Colman Smith; other divinatory decks (Marseilles, Etteilla, Golden Dawn etc.) almost always have simpler designs here, amounting to no more than a montage of the number of pips in question. And that is the pearl-in-the-oyster with this deck – a non-throwaway picture on each and every card. That's the secret behind its enduring success. That's the reason we have had a, literally uncountable, number of revamps and derivative decks.

Waite's main interest was the symbolism of the trumps and it seems that he gave Colman Smith much more leeway regarding the design of the pip cards. The designs on several of the cards are clearly drawn from the earlier Sola-Busca deck which either Waite or Colman Smith (or both) had almost certainly seen when the cards were exhibited at the British Museum a couple of years earlier. The suits of the new deck were the standard Latin ones but Waite revised the suit of clubs to be wands, and coins to be pentacles. Again, this idea was an unashamed attempt to graft on extra mysticism to the deck (wands and pentacles are magical; clubs and coins aren't).

A small book by Waite entitled The (Pictorial) Key to the Tarot was (optionally) bundled with the pack. In this, Waite purported to divulge the history behind his new cards, give guidance about their interpretation, and descriptions of their symbology. However, any true insight supposedly contained in the book was mostly obscured by Waite's pretentious, wordy and immodest writing. Fellow Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn member, Aleister Crowley, reviewing the book, said, "As to Mr Waite's constant pomposities, he seems to think that the obscurer his style and the vaguer his phrases, the greater initiate he will appear. Nobody but Mr Waite knows 'all' about the tarot, it appears; and he won't tell. ... If he would only go out of the swelled-head business he might be of some use." At one point, Crowley even put a mock obituary of the still very-much-alive Waite, titled Dead Weight, in his periodical The Equinox, complete with heavy black borders on every page:

The career of Arthur Edward Waite was largely determined by his father's fine perception. "Ned, my lad," said he when the future saint was barely six years of age, "brains are not your long suit, I can see. But it doesn’t matter. If you can't be wise, look wise!" These words sank deeply into the mind of the future saint, and only two days later, when his father handed him a work on the Integral Calculus, he looked through it in a steady professional manner, going backwards and forwards several times, knitting his brows, nodding his head and muttering, "H'm! Ingenious," now and again. He then closed the volume with a snap, and said in a tone of infinite finality: "Inferentially inadequate data machicholated cerebrothoracically."
"By jingo!" replied his father, "but you're IT!" ...
Arthur were wise, therefore, to find, if possible, a science so abstruse and venerable that no one at all understood it, and whose most respected authors wrote in an indecipherable cryptogram. Such a science was found for little Arthur (the future saint!) in Alchemy.

Ouch!

But Crowley was right: a lot of Waite's book is a difficult and unrewarding read. Nevertheless, the basic "divinatory meanings" associated with each card continue to be extracted from the book for use in the "little white booklets" almost always included with modern versions / interpretations of the deck.

Later, in the early 1940s, Crowley (in conjunction with artist Lady Frieda Harris) came up with his own set of cards, The Thoth Deck and, likewise, an accompanying book. In a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black, his book proved to be no more accessible or straightforward than Waite's! Furthermore, despite his broadsides against Waite, Crowley spent much of his later life trying to raise funds by attempting to sue anybody and everybody he believed had libelled him.

One significant early derivative deck should be mentioned at this point. In 1932, Paul Foster Case, the American founder of the Builders of the Adytum (BOTA) esoteric group, issued a reworking of Waite's tarot claiming it had mistakes and deliberate "blinds" in it. Case's deck was drawn by artist Jessie Burns Parke and was in black and white. The trumps and courts carried new artwork – very similar to the originals but with notable differences. Aces aside, the pip cards lost their bespoke artwork and reverted to simple montages of the suit motifs. Though Case intended the deck to always be black and white only, a colour set of the trumps was later issued. The deck is still available.

Numerous more-modern variants of the original deck also followed. Some kept the original Colman Smith drawings but added new, usually more vibrant, colour fills. Some publishers have tried to thin down the, admittedly rather thick and clumsy, original outlines. Yet others have chosen to completely retrace the pictures from scratch. However, as far as I know, there has yet to be published a really satisfactory "forensic" facsimile of the original, but even keeping track of the supposed replica decks is no easy task given the sea of similar names and aliases. U.S. Games' Smith-Waite Centennial Tarot (also included in the Pamela Colman Smith Commemorative Set ) and the Original Rider-Waite Tarot both suffer from misguided attempts to give the cards an added sepia tone to make them look old – one reviewer called them "tea stained" (Stuart Kaplan fiddling about with the "Make Sepia" and "Add Grain" buttons in Photoshop Elements is probably nearer the mark). And just when you thought enough was enough from U.S. Games, there's also a third "olde worlde" attempt: here the colours have been muted and a "craquelure" texture has been applied to the backgrounds (called Pamela Colman Smith's RWS Tarot deck, née Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot Deck ). Meanwhile, over at Lo Scarabeo, we have two supposed replica decks – Tarot Original 1909 and RWS Tarot Pamela Colman Smith. Both of these have over-coarse faux half-toning and both, for god-knows-what reason, swing the hues of all the blue colours around to be closer to green than blue. AGM-Urania have a supposedly authentic replica deck too, called Tarot of A.E. Waite – well, let's just say that the replaced card title boxes should be warning enough.

Anyway... jumping back... The cards shown here are from the first widespread version of the deck, known to scholars as "Pam-A" (there are also other versions called Pam-B, Pam-C and Pam-D – please see the excellent paper The Early Waite-Smith Tarot Editions by K Frank Jensen for further information on these). Pam-A and Pam-D seem to be derived from the same artwork, but Pam-B and Pam-C both feature a second, slightly different, alternate artwork. The Pam-A deck is usually regarded as the original and "truest" of the variants of the original deck. Opinion is divided over whether the final cards used a direct photographic reproduction of Colman Smith's originals, a photographic reproduction of redrawn artwork based on Colman Smith's originals, or plates engraved by a professional engraver (and therefore intrinsically a copy or, at best, a tracing of the originals). Some of the features of the cards suggest photolithography; some, engraving.

The images shown below are from a high-quality third-party set of scans of a, rather dirty, original Pam-A deck. The "dirt" seems mostly to be printer's set-off from the reverse of the card in front. I have – I hope sympathetically – cleaned up most of this problem, and these reproductions are probably as good as a Pam-A deck ever looked.

Click on any card to explore the design. Note that clicking on individual cards will call up very large images. Be aware of this if you are on a mobile / cell data plan!

(Comments, corrections or can-I-use requests, please e-mail: Click to see e-mail address.)

Card image size, below: Normal Bigger

Trumps

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Pentacles (i.e. coins)

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Wands (i.e. clubs)

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Cups

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Swords

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Extras

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(By popular demand!) The back of all the cards is a brick-red "crackle" pattern (left). The other image (right) is the back of the rare "pilot" version of the Pam-A deck, known as "rose and lilies", which was changed before the main production run. The rose-and-lilies engraving is very poor quality, I'm afraid.

Documents

Rider-Waite-Smith divinatory meanings.

The Rider-Waite-Smith tarot LWB that is supplied with many current decks.

The Pictorial Key to the Tarot by A E Waite. Yes, the 1910 Meisterwerk itself, scanned from an original copy. Cleaned and proof-read by me, and including high-quality reproductions of all the cards.

The Early Waite-Smith Tarot Editions by K Frank Jensen for information on the Pam-A, Pam-B, Pam-C and Pam-D variants.