Rider-Waite-Smith
The Rider-Waite-Smith is the tarot deck conceived by A.E. Waite, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith and published in London by the Rider company in 1909. Its great innovation: the 56 Minor Arcana are illustrated with full scenes, where earlier decks showed only repeated symbols. It became the dominant model of English-language tarot and has inspired the majority of contemporary decks.
What changes in the reading
With its illustrated minors, this deck hands you scenes: a figure weeping before spilled cups, another contemplating a garden. You can step into a card the way you step into a page of a novel, with nothing to memorize at the start. That is what makes it the deck most often recommended for beginning with tarot.
Pamela Colman Smith, the artist in the shadows
For a long time the deck carried only the names of Waite and the Rider company. Today we say Rider-Waite-Smith to give Pamela Colman Smith what is hers: all 78 drawings are her work, and the power of the minor scenes owes much to her storyteller’s line, shaped by her training in theater and illustration.
Sources
- , The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911)
- , Tarot for Your Self (1984)