Cards - Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot (Rider)

Rider-Waite-Smith tarot. Rider, United Kingdom. Full divinatory tarot deck, Mediterranean suited, 78 single-headed 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 (1857-1942), and drawn ("a big job for very little cash") by struggling London-based illustrator Pamela Colman Smith (1878-1951).

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 proposal by occultist SL MacGregor Mathers in the late 1800s: the pope card became the hierophant, and the papess became the high priestess. The pip cards were illustrated with bespoke images by Colman Smith; earlier decks almost always had simpler designs for these cards, amounting to little more than a montage of the number of pips in question. 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 (see links at end of page) 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 Mediterranean ones but Waite revised both the suit of clubs to be wands, and coins to be pentacles. Again, this idea stemmed from Mathers and was an unashamed attempt to graft on extra mysticism to the deck.

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 magazine The Equinox, complete with heavy black borders on every page. 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.

Numerous variants of the original deck followed. Some kept the original outlines of the artwork 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, there has yet to be published a satisfactory facsimile of the original. U.S. Games' Smith-Waite Centennial Tarot (also included in the Pamela Colman Smith Commemorative Set) and Original Rider-Waite Tarot both suffered 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.

Anyway... 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.

(*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 textbook case of the pot calling the kettle black, his book proved to be no more accessible or straightforward than Waite's! See links at end of page.)

Trumps

Pentacles (i.e. coins)

Wands (i.e. clubs)

Cups

Swords

Extras

(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

The deck on this page is one masterminded by a Golden Dawn (or its offshoots) member, or designed to adhere to their concepts of tarot. A list of other major such decks is given below (scroll/swipe to the right if needed):

Deck	Author/s	Artist/s (if diff.)	Release year	"Official" guide book	Notes
Marseilles tarot / Tarot de Marseille	unknown	various	15th century	The Tarot: Its Occult Signification, Use In Fortune-Telling, And Method Of Play, Etc.	The booklet cited (written in 1888 by Samuel L MacGregor Mathers of the Golden Dawn) gives "official" Golden Dawn divinatory meanings when using the Marseilles tarot (referred to at that time as the Italian tarot). In 1889, Swiss occultist and artist, Oswald Wirth, designed a well-known tarot specifically for esoteric use with his own versions of the trumps in the Marseilles pattern.
The Rider-Waite[-Smith] Tarot	Arthur Edward Waite	Pamela Colman Smith	1909	The [Pictorial] Key To The Tarot
Builders Of The Adytum (BOTA) Tarot	Paul Foster Case	Jessie Burns Parke	1931	The Tarot: A Key To The Wisdom Of The Ages or Highlights Of Tarot [NB doesn't cover pip cards]	Revised version of Rider-Waite with some "corrected" trumps and courts, and simple pip cards. Trumps also issued in colour form; full deck is b&w.
Thoth Tarot Deck	Aleister Crowley	Lady Frieda Harris	1972 (painted 1938-43)	The Book Of Thoth (Egyptian Tarot): A Short Essay On The Tarot Of The Egyptians
The Golden Dawn Tarot (aka The Whare Ra deck)	Israel Regardie	Robert Wang	1978	An Introduction To The Golden Dawn Tarot
The Hermetic Tarot	Godfrey Dowson		1979	Only the Little White Booklet that comes with the deck.	Black & white.
Golden Dawn Magical Tarot (aka The New Golden Dawn Ritual Tarot)	Chic Cicero & Sandra Tabatha Cicero (with Israel Regardie)		1991	Golden Dawn Magical Tarot / The New Golden Dawn Ritual Tarot	"Ritual" was the earlier name. Do not confuse this deck with the one below – they are different!
The Magical Tarot Of The Golden Dawn	Pat Zalewski & Chris Zalewski	Skip Dudchous & David Sledzinski	2022	The Magical Tarot Of The Golden Dawn: Revised Ed.	Earlier editions had art by Jonathon A Pierce instead. This deck is not to be confused with the similarly named deck above!

Links to other Rider-Waite-Smith tarot pages