By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 5, 2026
What Is the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot?
The Rider-Waite-Smith tarot is a 78-card deck published in London in 1909, designed by occultist Arthur Edward Waite and illustrated by artist Pamela Colman Smith. It was the first widely circulated deck to give every Minor Arcana card a full narrative scene, and its imagery still defines what most readers picture when they think of tarot.
More tarot decks have been printed since 1909 than any reasonable bibliography can hold, but the deck Waite and Smith made for the publisher William Rider & Son keeps reappearing as the reference point. U.S. Games Systems, the deck’s modern American licensee, estimates that more than one hundred million copies now circulate in over twenty countries, according to the publisher’s own catalogue notes on Pamela Colman Smith [1]. The reason has less to do with marketing than with the way Smith’s pictures behave on the table. They invite the reader’s eye to wander, and the wandering itself becomes the reading.
This guide moves through the deck the way a careful editor reads a manuscript. It names the people who made it, the older symbol systems they drew on, and the specific visual choices that turned a Victorian esoteric experiment into the lingua franca of modern divination. It situates the deck inside the broader landscape of mystical and occult practices without flattening the strangeness of what Waite and Smith were actually trying to do.
Who Made the Deck, and Why It Matters
The deck has three names because three forces produced it: a publisher, a scholar, and an artist. For most of the twentieth century only the first two received credit. The recovery of Pamela Colman Smith’s authorship is the single largest correction the tarot literature has made in the last forty years.
Arthur Edward Waite, the Scholar
Arthur Edward Waite (1857-1942) was a British poet and self-taught historian of Western esotericism. He joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1891 and worked his way through its grades over the following decade. Waite was not a magician in the showy sense. He was a bibliographer with a mystic’s seriousness, and he distrusted the practical occultism of his contemporaries. By 1909, he had broken with the original Golden Dawn and was leading a successor body called the Independent and Rectified Order of the Golden Dawn. The tarot project was meant, in his mind, to recover what he considered the authentic mystical core of the cards from the divinatory literature he viewed as superficial. His companion volume, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911), still sits beside the deck in most modern editions, and the public-domain text remains freely available through the Sacred Texts archive [2].
Pamela Colman Smith, the Artist
Pamela Colman Smith (1878-1951), called “Pixie” by friends, was an Anglo-American artist with an unusual cultural range. She was born in London, raised partly in Brooklyn and Kingston, Jamaica, and trained at the Pratt Institute in New York before returning to England in 1899. She illustrated books for William Butler Yeats and Bram Stoker, ran a small hand-printed magazine called The Green Sheaf, and showed paintings at Alfred Stieglitz’s Gallery 291 in 1907 — the first non-photographic exhibition Stieglitz mounted there. Yeats introduced her to the Golden Dawn, which she joined in 1901. She produced all 78 tarot designs in roughly six months in 1909, working from Waite’s instructions for the Major Arcana but, by his own admission, inventing the Minor Arcana scenes herself [3]. She was paid a flat fee, received no royalties, and died in financial precarity in 1951, a biographical outline now expanded in the consolidated entry on her life and work [3].
The Rider Imprint
William Rider & Son was a London publisher specializing in mystical, occult, and Theosophical titles. The firm released the deck in late 1909, with copyright dated 1910. The pack carried no individual credit on the box for Smith. For most of the twentieth century the cards were sold simply as the “Rider” or “Rider-Waite” deck. The hyphenated three-name form, “Rider-Waite-Smith,” entered general use only in the 1990s, championed first by scholar-readers and then formalized by U.S. Games Systems on later print runs [1]. The shift was not cosmetic. It re-attributes roughly three-quarters of the visible artwork — every Minor Arcana scene — to the artist who actually invented it.
The Sources Behind the Symbols
Smith and Waite did not draw their imagery from nothing. The deck rests on a layered tradition of older European occultism, roughly four strata deep, each contributing a recognizable vocabulary that an attentive reader can still trace card by card.
The Tarot de Marseille Substrate
The earliest layer is the Tarot de Marseille, the standard French pattern that crystallized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Marseille decks fixed the order and roster of the 22 Major Arcana — Fool, Magician, Popess, Empress, Emperor, and so on through the World — and gave the four suits of Cups, Coins, Swords, and Batons a stable iconography. Waite kept the structure and most of the figures. He renamed the Popess as the High Priestess and the Pope as the Hierophant, partly in deference to early-twentieth-century English readers and partly to mark the deck as ritually rather than ecclesiastically Christian.
Eliphas Levi and the Kabbalistic Layer
The second layer is the work of Alphonse Louis Constant, the French former seminarian who wrote under the name Eliphas Levi (1810-1875). Levi’s Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1856) proposed that the 22 Major Arcana correspond to the 22 Hebrew letters and to the 22 paths of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. This single move turned the tarot from a card game with a fortune-telling sideline into the central diagram of Western ceremonial magic. Smith’s pillared backgrounds, her use of Hebrew letters, and her placement of solar and lunar emblems all assume a reader who has at least heard of Levi’s framework as summarized by Britannica [4].
The Golden Dawn Curriculum
The third layer is the secret instructional material of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the London magical society founded in 1888. Both Waite and Smith were initiates. The Order assigned each Major Arcana a planet, an astrological sign, an element, a Hebrew letter, and a path on the Tree of Life. Waite’s most consequential single decision in the deck was to switch the traditional positions of Strength (number 8) and Justice (number 11), so that Strength would correspond to Leo and Justice to Libra in line with Golden Dawn astrology. The change is small on the page and enormous in interpretation. Most modern decks descend from this re-numbering [5].
Christian Hermeticism and Personal Mysticism
The fourth layer is Waite’s own Christian Hermeticism, the same current that shaped his Fellowship of the Rosy Cross after 1915. He read the Major Arcana as a veiled record of the soul’s progress toward divine union, and he asked Smith to adjust certain images accordingly. The Lovers card, which had shown a young man choosing between two women in earlier decks, became Adam and Eve under an angelic figure, framed as a meditation on spiritual rather than romantic union.
The Major Arcana: Reading the Twenty-Two
The Major Arcana are the deck’s narrative spine. Numbered from 0 to 21, they present a sequence later writers have called the Fool’s Journey: a wanderer (the Fool) moves through encounters with archetypal figures and forces and arrives, at card 21, at integration with the world. Smith gave each of these cards a tightly composed scene. A handful repay especially close looking.
The Fool, the Magician, the High Priestess
The Fool (0) stands at a precipice with one foot off the cliff, a small white dog leaping at his heel and a white rose loose in his left hand. The roses, the dog, and the bag on his stick will reappear, transposed, throughout the deck. The Magician (1) raises a wand toward heaven and points the other hand toward earth, the gesture echoing Levi’s instruction “as above, so below” from his Hermetic readings. The four suit emblems lie on the table before him. The High Priestess (2) sits between two pillars marked B and J, for Boaz and Jachin, the bronze pillars before the Temple of Solomon described in 1 Kings 7. A pomegranate-veil hangs behind her, the fruit a Greek symbol of Persephone and the underworld. She wears a triple-crown form lifted from images of the goddess Isis.
Death, the Tower, the Star
Death (13) rides a white horse beneath a small rising sun framed between two distant towers. A king lies fallen, a bishop pleads, a child looks up. The card asks the reader to register transformation rather than literal mortality. The Tower (16) shows lightning shearing a crown from a stone tower while two figures fall. The Star (17) presents a naked woman pouring water from two vessels, one onto land and one back into a pool. Above her, a great eight-pointed star is surrounded by seven smaller ones. The asymmetry of the water — half returned, half retained — is the kind of compositional decision that distinguishes Smith’s work from her sources.
The World as Closure
The World (21) closes the sequence. A central figure, neither fully male nor female, dances inside a laurel wreath. In the four corners stand the symbolic creatures of Ezekiel’s vision: man, eagle, lion, ox. These also map to the four Evangelists in Christian tradition and the four fixed signs of the zodiac in astrology. Smith’s composition turns the figure into the still center of a cosmos in motion. Waite, in The Pictorial Key, called it the assured garment of the soul.
The Minor Arcana: Smith’s Quiet Revolution
The Minor Arcana span four suits of fourteen cards each: Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles, with court cards Page, Knight, Queen, and King. In the older Marseille tradition, the numbered cards (the pip cards, two through ten) carried only repeating geometric arrangements of their suit symbol — five swords were drawn as five swords, with no scene at all. Smith’s decision to compose a small painting for every pip is, as the Victoria and Albert Museum catalogue entry notes, the deck’s most enduring single innovation [6].
Suit Correspondences
The four suits map to the classical elements as the Golden Dawn taught them. Wands carry fire and creative will. Cups carry water and emotion. Swords carry air and intellect. Pentacles carry earth and material life. Smith’s color choices reinforce the assignment. Wands appear against orange and gold; Cups against soft blue-greens; Swords against pale grey; Pentacles against rich earth tones. The reader’s eye learns the elemental key without being told.
Three Cards That Demonstrate the Method
Three Minor Arcana scenes show what Smith’s method does in practice.
- The Ten of Cups: a couple stands beside a small house, arms raised in gratitude, two children dancing nearby. A rainbow of ten cups arches over them. The card distills domestic completion in a single image; no list of meanings is needed.
- The Five of Swords: one figure in the foreground gathers swords from defeated opponents who walk away in the middle distance. Smith’s positioning leaves moral judgment open. Is the central figure a victor or a thief?
- The Eight of Pentacles: a craftsman sits at a workbench engraving a series of pentacles, six already mounted on a post and one in his hand. The card is a small portrait of skilled labor that Smith plainly drew from observation.
These scenes do not carry hidden Kabbalistic codes. They were intended to be readable. That readability is precisely why beginners pick the deck up and why working readers stay with it.
Why the Deck Won
Within twenty years of publication, the Rider-Waite-Smith had begun to displace the older Marseille pattern in English-speaking markets. Several forces, none of them sufficient on their own, combined to make this happen.
Pictorial Pip Cards
The first reason is the simplest: a beginner can pick up the deck and read it. Marseille pips reward years of memorization. Smith’s pips reward attention. This single design decision lowered the entry barrier for tarot from initiation-level to evening-paperback level. The shift coincided with a Victorian and Edwardian appetite for accessible esoterica that William Rider & Son had been cultivating in print for two decades.
U.S. Games Systems and the 1971 Reissue
The second reason is commercial. The original printings went out of widespread distribution by the 1940s. In 1971, the American firm U.S. Games Systems acquired North American rights from the British publisher’s successor and reissued the deck with refreshed colors. The reissue arrived precisely as the American counterculture was looking for spiritual technologies that were portable and visual. By 1980 the Rider-Waite was the default tarot in nearly every American bookstore [1].
Imitation as Confirmation
The third reason is reflexive. Once enough decks copied the structure of Smith’s images, those images became the structure of tarot itself. Modern decks are routinely described as “Rider-Waite-based,” meaning their Three of Cups also features three women raising chalices, their Death rides a horse, their Hanged Man hangs by one leg. The original deck became its own genre.
Reading the Deck Today
A century after publication, the Rider-Waite-Smith remains the working tool of professional readers and a steady seller in bookshops. Its modern life is shaped less by Waite’s mystical theology than by Smith’s pictorial intelligence, which is to say by the artist whose name was kept off the box for sixty years.
The Smith-Waite Centennial Edition
In 2009, on the deck’s hundredth anniversary, U.S. Games Systems issued the Smith-Waite Centennial Edition, printed in muted earth-toned palettes drawn from Smith’s earliest proofs. The reissue placed Smith’s name first on the box, signaling the broader scholarly correction. The Centennial paired with new biographical work by Stuart Kaplan and others, including the 2018 study Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story, which gathered original sketches, watercolors, and personal letters that had been scattered across museums for decades.
The Limits of Reading
No single account of the deck’s symbolism is final. Waite himself wrote that the cards veiled what they revealed. Smith’s letters from the 1909 working months show an artist absorbed in the visual problem rather than in any fixed scheme. A serious reader holds two propositions at once: the deck is densely encoded with material from older traditions, and any single decoding leaves out half the picture. That double posture is what the cards reward.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Rider-Waite-Smith mean?
Rider-Waite-Smith names the deck’s three contributors: William Rider & Son, the London publisher who released it in 1909; Arthur Edward Waite, the occultist who designed the conceptual scheme; and Pamela Colman Smith, the artist who illustrated all 78 cards. The hyphenated form replaced the older “Rider-Waite” label in the 1990s.
Who actually drew the Rider-Waite tarot cards?
Pamela Colman Smith drew every one of the 78 cards. She produced the work in roughly six months in 1909 from a small London studio, working from Waite’s written instructions for the Major Arcana but inventing the Minor Arcana scenes on her own initiative.
Why was Pamela Colman Smith forgotten for so long?
She received a flat commission with no royalties, no copyright, and no individual credit on the original packaging. Smith was a woman, an Anglo-American outsider, and not a member of the British establishment. The combination kept her out of standard occult bibliographies until scholars began the recovery work in the 1980s.
How is the Rider-Waite-Smith different from the Tarot de Marseille?
The Major Arcana figures are roughly the same, with two important reorderings (Strength and Justice). The decisive difference is the Minor Arcana. Marseille pip cards show only repeating suit symbols. Rider-Waite-Smith pip cards show full narrative scenes that allow intuitive reading from the imagery alone.
What does the infinity symbol on the Magician mean?
The lemniscate, or sideways figure-eight, hovering above the Magician’s head represents continuous creative energy and the unity of opposites. The same symbol reappears in the Strength card and on the Two of Pentacles, marking moments where opposing forces are held in balance.
What is the Fool’s Journey?
The Fool’s Journey is a twentieth-century interpretive frame for reading the Major Arcana as a single narrative. The Fool (card 0) is treated as a wanderer who passes through the encounters of cards 1 through 21 in order, ending in the integration depicted by the World. The frame was popularized by writers including Eden Gray in the 1960s.
Was the deck designed for fortune-telling or for spiritual study?
Both. Waite presented the deck as a symbolic record of mystical philosophy and dismissed lower divinatory uses in his prose. The book accompanying the deck nonetheless gives card-by-card divinatory meanings. In practice, the deck has been used for both purposes since 1910.
What is the best way to learn the Rider-Waite-Smith deck?
Begin with Smith’s pictures, not Waite’s prose. Spend an unhurried hour with each card and write down what the scene shows. Compare your notes with Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot, then with a modern guide such as Rachel Pollack’s Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (1980). The visual method follows the deck’s grain.
