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You Know the Deck. But Do You Know the Artist?
You’ve seen the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. Maybe it was the first one you ever picked up. Maybe you’re still reading with it. Either way, it’s everywhere. It’s the blueprint. But let’s cut the bullshit – most people have no idea who actually drew those cards. Spoiler: it wasn’t Rider. It wasn’t even Waite.
Pamela Colman Smith, known to her mates as Pixie, is the one who brought those cards to life. And yet, for the better part of a century, she was left out of the story. No royalties. No credit. No legacy. Not until tarot nerds and queers and feminists started digging. Now she’s finally getting her name back, but it’s taken a ridiculous amount of time.
This post is my attempt to put things right. To talk about who she was, how she transformed tarot, and why I (and many others) consider her a queer icon, even if the history books are a bit cagey about it. Honestly, tarot as we know it wouldn’t exist without her. And I’m not exaggerating. Let’s get into it.
Who the Hell Was Pamela Colman Smith?
A Life Between Worlds
Pamela was born in 1878 in London, but she didn’t stay there long. Her family moved around loads – Jamaica, Brooklyn, back to London. So from early on she was steeped in different cultures, stories, and mythologies. That mix of influences never really left her. You can see it in her art, in the way she told stories, and in the weird, liminal, otherworldly feel that runs through everything she made.
Her Jamaican upbringing especially shows up in her early work – she published a book called Annancy Stories, based on Afro-Caribbean folklore, and made a name for herself as someone who could spin a story in both words and pictures. She was also synaesthetic, meaning she experienced sound as colour. That’s not just a cool quirk, it shaped the way she created. Her art isn’t just visual, it’s sensory. It’s alive.
The Art School Years and the Rise of Pixie
She went to Pratt Institute in New York, which was a big deal at the time, especially for women. There she trained as an illustrator, developed her unique style, and started to build a portfolio that was anything but ordinary. By her early twenties she was illustrating books, writing her own stories, and hanging out with all sorts of artistic types.
She also started using the nickname “Pixie,” which honestly just fits. Her art is full of whimsy and weirdness, but it’s never soft or insubstantial. There’s a toughness to it. A clarity. She wasn’t trying to be palatable, she was doing her own thing, and that thing was magic.
Theatre, Weirdos, and Occult Vibes
Back in London, she got involved in theatre – designing sets and costumes, doing illustrations, and moving in circles full of creative, queer, spiritual misfits. She met Ellen Terry (one of the most famous actors of the time), and through her, people like Bram Stoker and W.B. Yeats.
That’s how she ended up in the orbit of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a mystical secret society that was kind of like the Avengers for occultists. It was through that network that she met Arthur Edward Waite, who would go on to commission her to create a tarot deck.
But let’s be clear. Pixie wasn’t just someone’s assistant. She wasn’t a hired hand. She was a visionary in her own right. Waite had the ideas, sure. But it was Pamela who turned those ideas into something you could actually see. And feel.
The Deck That Changed Everything
What Came Before
Before Pamela got her hands on it, tarot was a bit… flat. The Major Arcana (the big, archetypal cards) were usually illustrated, but the Minor Arcana? Just numbers and symbols. Five cups. Four swords. No story. No characters. No emotion.
It was basically a playing card system with a spiritual twist, and unless you’d studied occult symbolism, it didn’t make a lot of intuitive sense. That’s where Pixie came in. And what she did next completely changed the game.
Pamela’s Vision for the Cards
When Waite asked her to illustrate a new tarot deck in 1909, she didn’t just draw pretty pictures. She created an entire world. She brought the cards to life. She gave each of the 78 cards its own scene, its own vibe, its own emotional weight. Especially in the Minor Arcana – the part no one had ever bothered to illustrate before.
Think about that. She didn’t just revolutionise the look of tarot. She redefined how we use tarot. Suddenly, you didn’t need to have a library of esoteric knowledge in your head to read the cards. You could look at the scene and get a feel for what it meant. That was her doing.
Her theatre background definitely played a role. Each card is like a snapshot from a play, full of characters mid-action, dramatic moments, and emotional stakes. In many of them, you can literally see the stage – wooden floorboards, backdrops, and curtains framing the scene like a performance frozen in time. It’s intuitive, rich, and layered in a way that hadn’t been done before. That theatrical storytelling style has become the foundation of almost every tarot deck since.
Hidden Symbols, Personal Touches
She also embedded loads of symbolism in the images – some of it directed by Waite, some of it totally her own. And she snuck in little personal touches, like her own monogram on every card (except The Fool, ironically). There’s a theory that some of the figures in the cards were based on her friends, including queer theatre folks like Edith Craig.
So yeah. She didn’t just illustrate the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. She transformed tarot.
Erased From Her Own Work
The Credit (or Lack of It)
When the deck was published, the name on the box was “Rider-Waite.” Rider was the publisher. Waite was the writer. And Pixie? Nowhere. Her name wasn’t mentioned. She was paid a one-off fee and that was that.
No royalties. No public recognition. No mention of the fact that she’d just completely reinvented the tarot.
It’s a textbook case of erasure. And while it’s easy to say “that’s just how things were back then,” that doesn’t make it okay. She did the work. She changed the game. And the system just pretended she didn’t exist.
Why She Was Overlooked
There’s a lot going on here. She was a woman. She was mixed race. She was eccentric and deeply spiritual. She didn’t marry. She didn’t follow the script. She was basically everything that Edwardian society didn’t want in a respected artist or intellectual.
So instead of celebrating her, they sidelined her. They took her art and her ideas and her labour and left her out of the story.
The Slow Return of Her Name
It wasn’t until the 1970s that tarot readers and historians started digging into who actually created the deck. People like Mary K. Greer and Stuart Kaplan started writing about her. And slowly, her name was reattached to the work she had brought to life.
Now it’s widely known as the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, and some folks even flip it to the Smith-Waite Tarot – putting her name first, where it probably should’ve been all along.
Was She Queer?
No Men, No Marriage, Lots of Women
Pixie never married. She never had public relationships with men. Instead, she spent the last decades of her life living with a woman named Nora Lake. She left everything to her in her will. You can draw your own conclusions.
Now, obviously people didn’t go around saying “I’m a lesbian” in 1909. But queerness isn’t always about labels. It’s about how you live, who you love, what circles you move in. And Pixie’s world was full of queer artists, theatre makers, and spiritual outsiders.
Queer Circles, Queer Energy
She was close friends with Edith Craig and Christabel Marshall (aka Christopher St. John) – a known lesbian couple. Her art blurred gender roles, played with archetypes, and held space for outsiders. There’s a softness and strength in her figures that still resonates with queer readers today.
So was Pamela Colman Smith queer? We can’t say for sure. But it’s a very safe bet. She lived and loved and created in queer spaces. Her life reads queer. And for a lot of us, that’s enough.
Why It Matters
It matters because queer people have always existed. We’ve always created, shaped, led, imagined. And we’ve also been erased. Just like Pamela was.
So reclaiming her queerness isn’t about rewriting history. It’s about filling in the blanks that were deliberately left empty. It’s about seeing ourselves in the people who came before us, and giving them the credit they were denied.
The Revival of Her Legacy
The Tarot Community Starts Paying Attention
It took far too long, but eventually the tarot community began to clock what had happened. In the 1970s, researchers like Stuart Kaplan started digging into the origins of the Rider-Waite deck, and surprise surprise, found Pamela’s fingerprints all over it. Mary K. Greer and other tarot historians began writing about her, finally putting her name back in the conversation. The name Rider-Waite-Smith started to catch on, slowly, awkwardly, but necessarily. Some readers now even flip the order and call it the Smith-Waite deck, which feels like justice, even if it’s a bit late.
This shift didn’t happen overnight. It took decades of tarot readers, historians, and artists demanding that her name be recognised. As more people started studying tarot’s history, the evidence became undeniable. Pamela Colman Smith wasn’t just an illustrator – she was a visionary who fundamentally shaped tarot as we know it. Without her, the deck wouldn’t exist in the way it does today.
From Obscurity to Museum Walls
It’s not just tarot nerds talking about her now. Pamela’s work has been shown in major galleries, and special edition decks have been published to celebrate her contributions. Her art is being appreciated on its own terms – not just as tarot imagery, but as powerful, mystical, theatrical art in its own right.
In recent years, exhibitions have explored her life and work beyond just tarot, shining a light on her theatre designs, book illustrations, and storytelling. This recognition is long overdue, but it’s finally happening. More and more, she’s being acknowledged as an artist whose influence extends far beyond one deck.
She Shaped the Entire Tarot Landscape
Her Influence is Everywhere
Let’s be real: most modern tarot decks wouldn’t exist without Pamela Colman Smith. Her decision to illustrate all 78 cards didn’t just make tarot more accessible, it changed the rules. She made the Minor Arcana readable. She made tarot a visual language, not just a symbolic one. Almost every deck you’ve seen since – even the wildly different ones – owes her something.
Her style, composition, and approach to storytelling set the template for what tarot could be. Even decks that claim to be radically different still borrow elements from her framework. Whether it’s the narrative-driven cards or the emotional weight packed into every scene, her fingerprints are everywhere.
The Weiser Tarot: A Visual Restoration
One of the best recent tributes is the Weiser Tarot, which takes her original line work and refreshes the colouring, aiming to bring it closer to what she might have envisioned. The colours we associate with the Rider-Waite-Smith deck today likely weren’t hers—she created the line work, but the colouring was often done by others.
The Weiser Tarot is a reclamation of sorts. It sharpens the details of her artwork while staying faithful to her style, offering a fresh but respectful take on her original vision. It stands as a reminder that her work continues to be adapted and appreciated by new generations.
Reimaginings, Homages, and Spoofs
There are decks that directly reinterpret her artwork, keeping the core compositions intact but updating the details. The Queer Tarot reimagines her scenes with queer, trans, fat, Black, and brown bodies, maintaining the traditional structure while making the imagery more inclusive. The Modern Witch Tarot does something similar, offering a fresh, contemporary take with diverse, feminine, and empowered figures.
Other decks play with her work in more conceptual ways. The Four-Twenty Tarot keeps her original layouts but adds a stoner theme, turning her classic scenes into weed-infused visions. Before Tarot and After Tarot expand on her work by showing what happens just before or after the moments she illustrated. Tarot of the New Vision takes a different approach, rotating the perspective so we see what’s happening behind the figures in the classic scenes.
Beyond these direct reinterpretations, Pamela’s blueprint is visible in countless themed decks. Cat decks replace her human figures with felines while keeping the same compositions and symbolic gestures. Goth decks infuse her classic framework with darker, more macabre aesthetics, while meme decks inject humour into the familiar imagery. Even decks built around specific fandoms still rely on the foundation she built.
Even the Indie Darlings Owe Her
Even if a deck looks nothing like the Rider-Waite-Smith on the surface, its structure and storytelling still reflect Pamela’s influence. The Light Seer’s Tarot softens her compositions with a more dreamlike, intuitive style, but the essence of her framework remains. The Fifth Spirit Tarot takes a non-binary and gender-expansive approach to her archetypes, making tarot more inclusive while still honouring her foundations.
Even more abstract decks like The Wild Unknown Tarot may appear to deviate from her influence, but they still follow the same approach to narrative, symbolism, and structure. Her impact is inescapable.
Her influence isn’t just about the look of tarot—it’s about how the cards function as a storytelling tool. Pamela turned tarot into a visual and intuitive system, and that impact is still unfolding in every new deck being created today.
More Than a Footnote
Recognising Her Role in Tarot History
Pamela wasn’t just some assistant illustrator hired to decorate someone else’s spiritual theory. She was the co-creator of modern tarot. She shaped the most-used deck in history. She left her mark on every single reading, whether people know her name or not.
For years, her contributions were downplayed or outright ignored. But now, with growing awareness, more tarot readers and historians are making sure her name is remembered. The shift towards calling it the Rider-Waite-Smith deck might seem small, but it’s part of a larger movement to ensure women and queer people aren’t erased from spiritual history.
Why It Matters
This isn’t just about credit where credit is due. It’s about recognising that history has often pushed aside the contributions of people like Pamela – women, queer people, artists who didn’t fit the mould. By reclaiming her name and her legacy, we push back against the forces that tried to erase her in the first place.
She deserves more than a footnote. She deserves to be celebrated – as an artist, a mystic, a queer icon, and the mother of modern tarot.
Final Thoughts: Say Her Name
Every time we talk about the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, we keep her name alive. Every time we choose a deck that builds on her work, we honour her legacy. Every time we challenge the systems that erased her, we do what she didn’t get the chance to do in her lifetime.
So next time you lay out a spread, remember Pixie. Say her name. And if you want to go deeper into the symbolism she painted into every single card, check out my tarot card meanings pages. That’s where the magic lives.
