The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot

There have been thousands of decks that have been created since the birth of tarot, but no work has influenced our modern concept of tarot more than the Rider-Waite deck. Although the Rider-Waite deck was produced over a century ago, the influence of both Arthur E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith are apparent in nearly every deck created since. As members of a Western occult organization known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Waite and Smith became particularly fascinated by the symbolism of the tarot in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Waite was a prolific writer and scholar of the Kabbalah, mysticism, and ceremonial magic, and his interest in creating a new deck was primarily for the purpose of divination. Pamela, who was also known as Pixie, had been well-acquainted with the Golden Dawn’s esoteric insights into the tarot, which is one of the reasons Waite commissioned her to collaborate on a revolutionary tarot deck in 1909. The Golden Dawn incorporated tarot extensively into its rituals, and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, a key figure in the organization’s establishment, authored a comprehensive treatise on Tarot commonly known as Book T. Waite intended to convey esoteric truths through symbolically dense illustrated minors, allowing the average reader to intuit the significance of each card through wonderfully elaborate scenes. In his later writing, Waite acknowledged that he prioritized expressing esoteric knowledge through the twenty-two major cards, thereby granting Pixie more artistic freedom to express the allegorical meanings in the minor cards. While Waite continued to profit from the Rider-Waite tarot for many years, Pixie, who possessed an innovative vision, artistic talent, and had revolutionized the minor cards, passed away in 1951 in obscurity and financial hardship.