Rider-Waite-Smith: The Deck That Changed Everything

You probably know this deck. You’ve used it, or you’ve at least seen someone else using it. It’s arguably the most famous deck in existence, and if you learned tarot the way most of us did, it’s the deck sitting underneath everything you think you know.

But for most of tarot’s history, this deck didn’t exist. Tarot is far older than 1909, and to understand why the Rider-Waite-Smith changed everything, you have to start with what tarot was before it. So this week is the context. The first of four weeks on this one deck.

It Started as a Game

Tarot was created in the 1400s, and it started out as a game. Not divination, not fortune telling, not reflection or contemplation. A game, played with cards, called tarocchi. The decks we now treat as sacred were made because rich people wanted fancy cards, often with their own faces on the trump cards, like the Emperor. It was a fancy, rich, wanky way of playing cards.

Decks like the Visconti were commissioned by exactly those people. But the game caught on, and the system of cards spread beyond the wealthy Italians who could afford a bespoke painted deck.

The Marseille Deck and the Problem of Pips

Around 1760, roughly 250 years later, the first mass-produced tarot deck arrived. The Tarot de Marseille, and it stayed dominant for centuries. Its Major Arcana were illustrated with clear lines and bold colour, though a lot of those colours came later. Plenty of earlier decks were just outlines printed from wood presses.

The minor arcana, though, were just pips. By pips I mean a card that shows you four cups, or five cups, and not much else. No scene, nothing illustrated to read from. So when tarot did start being used for readings, you needed a lot of training. You had to know what the number meant, how it related to its suit, and hold all of that in your head. Six coins meant something different to five coins, and the card itself gave you very little to go on.

The Egyptian Myth and the First Divination Deck

As tarot got used more for divination, a man called Antoine Court de Gébelin made a claim, and I need to say clearly that it was false. He said tarot came from ancient Egypt, inherited from the great Book of Thoth, an archetypal system carried down from the Egyptians. Now there is an archetypal system in tarot, people have read that into the cards almost as long as they’ve been reading them. But the link to actual Egyptian symbolism doesn’t hold up against what we now understand of Egypt. The parallels are interesting. The history is made up.

Off the back of that, a man called Jean-Baptiste Alliette, who went by Etteilla, created a deck now known as the Etteilla Tarot. Still a pip deck, but the first ever made specifically for divination, with its own system of meanings that differs from other traditions. That brings us to around 1780 or 1790.

The Golden Dawn and Arthur Edward Waite

About a hundred years later, in the late 19th century, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult organisation, began building a systematic approach to the occult and to tarot. One of its members, Arthur Edward Waite, got deeply interested in the cards and wrote a number of books about them.

Waite worked with an artist called Pamela Colman Smith to produce what we now call the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. And this was the first mass-produced deck to fully illustrate all 78 cards, including the 56 minors. The Five of Pentacles became an actual scene. The Five of Wands became people fighting, instead of just five wands sitting there.

What Pamela Colman Smith Actually Did

Here’s the part worth sitting with. Smith’s imagery went far beyond the briefs Waite gave her. You can read his notes for each card in his book, the Pictorial Key to the Tarot, and then look at what she actually drew, and see everything she added with her own creative flair. The tongue of the lion licking the figure’s hand on the Strength card isn’t in Waite’s notes. It’s hers. Once you start looking, that pattern is everywhere. We come back to her properly next week.

Why It Changed Everything

This fundamentally changed how we read. Before, you’d look at a card, count four cups, and have to work out what four meant and how it related to the suit. Some readers do that brilliantly straight off a pip deck, and fair play to them. But put the illustrated Four of Cups next to that, and it’s a far richer image to read from. You’re handed a scene, not a sum.

Plenty of people love that. Some really don’t. The objection is that it makes readers too reliant on the picture. And there’s something in that, but it misses a bigger point. These images aren’t simply intuitive. They’re coded. There’s Kabbalah in them, astrological symbols, numerological symbols, built for initiates of the Golden Dawn, a society with a deep occult system. The cards were designed for people fluent in that world, and a lot of it we now gloss straight over, because it isn’t part of how most of us were taught.

It Became the Standard

This deck became the standard so completely that it changed the order of the cards. In the Rider-Waite-Smith, Strength is card eight, then the Hermit at nine, the Wheel of Fortune at ten, and Justice at eleven. In the Marseille deck it’s the other way round, Justice at eight and Strength at eleven. This deck quietly rewrote that, and it stuck.

The imagery spread too. You see near-literal versions of it in decks like the Modern Witch Tarot or Queer Tarot, and you see its DNA in others like the Fifth Spirit Tarot or the Light Seer’s Tarot. What Smith drew is now fundamental to how tarot gets taught. How I teach it.

These Scenes Aren’t Neutral

This is the thing I want to leave you with. The Rider-Waite-Smith was the last big revision to tarot’s order and setup, so a huge amount of what feels like just tarot was actually settled here. And it’s settled with a particular worldview baked in. Judgement, with its angel and trumpet and people rising from tombs, is lifted straight from the Book of Revelation. The figures around the Wheel of Fortune come from Revelation too. The Lovers gives you Adam and Eve and the Archangel Raphael.

The deck is also very whitewashed. Lots of white figures, very few who aren’t. The four figures in the corners are the four evangelists, according to Waite, who was a Christian himself. So much of this imagery sits in a Western Christian context, the Devil and the Hierophant especially. That doesn’t make tarot a Christian-only thing, the tarot church is broad. But it does mean we should recognise the bias the cards carry. And it matters, because every learning resource I can think of, Biddy Tarot, Labyrinthos, most guidebooks, my own website, is built around this one deck.

Look at Your Own Deck

So here’s what to do with this. Look at the deck you read with, and at this one. What do you notice in the imagery that you maybe wouldn’t have seen in an earlier deck? And ask yourself this: what would you actually do if someone handed you a deck where every minor card just looked like five bare coins? It’d be pretty hard to read, unless you’re genuinely good with pips, in which case you’re a better reader than me.

Next week we go deep on Pamela Colman Smith, the artist, the real mastermind behind these cards. The week after, Arthur Edward Waite, his mind, how he shaped the deck, and a few of the feuds he had with others in the tarot world. And finally, the decks this one inspired, at least the ones I can get my hands on.