The Deck Everyone Pictures, and the Woman Who Drew It
The Rider-Waite-Smith deck is 1909, and the artist was paid a flat fee and credited by her initials. Here is where the cards you know actually came from.
Picture a tarot card. Whatever came to mind, there is a good chance you pictured something Pamela Colman Smith drew in 1909.
Her images are so dominant that most people assume they are the tarot, in the way that a particular set of playing card faces is just what playing cards look like. They are not. They are one deck, made by three specific people, at a specific moment, and knowing the story changes how you read them.
The cards were a game first
The most useful fact about tarot history is the one that surprises people most: the cards were invented for a card game and were played for about three hundred years before anybody read them.
Tarocchi appears in fifteenth century Italy as a trick-taking game with a fifth suit of trumps. It is still played. The earliest surviving decks were luxury objects commissioned by noble families, and nothing about them suggests divination.
Cartomancy with tarot arrives in eighteenth century France, and the occult framing arrives with it: an invented Egyptian origin, an invented ancient lineage. Almost everything presented as ancient in modern tarot is younger than the printing press and a fair amount of it is younger than the telephone.
The Golden Dawn, 1888
The system underneath most modern decks comes from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a British occult society founded in 1888.
They did something genuinely systematic: they mapped the whole deck onto the zodiac, the planets, the four elements and the Hebrew alphabet. Every attribution on this site comes from that work.
They also made an editorial decision that is still visible on the cards. They swapped Strength and Justice, moving Strength to VIII and Justice to XI, so the trumps would line up with the zodiac in order. If you have ever noticed those two cards carrying different numbers in different decks, that is why. Older French decks such as the Marseille use the original arrangement.
Waite, Smith and Rider
Arthur Edward Waite was a Golden Dawn member, a prolific occult writer, and by most accounts not an easy man. In 1909 he commissioned a new deck and wrote its manual, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, which is still the primary source for what the images were meant to show.
The publisher was William Rider and Son. Hence Rider-Waite.
The artist was Pamela Colman Smith, a working illustrator and theatre designer, born in London in 1878, raised partly in Jamaica and partly in the United States. She was paid a flat fee for the commission. No royalties. Her credit on the deck is her monogram in the corner of each card, a small PCS, which is why the deck was called Rider-Waite for most of a century.
Calling it Rider-Waite-Smith is a recent correction and a deserved one.
What Smith actually changed
This is the part that matters for reading, not just for fairness.
Before 1909, the numbered minor cards in most decks were pips: five cups arranged on a plain background, eight swords in a pattern, nothing to interpret. Readers worked from the number and the suit, which is a real skill and a harder one.
Smith gave all fifty-six minors a scene. Five of Cups became a cloaked figure looking at three spilled cups and not at the two still standing. Eight of Swords became a bound and blindfolded woman inside a fence with a large gap in it.
That single decision is why tarot became learnable by ordinary people. You can read a Smith minor by describing what is happening in it. You cannot do that with a Marseille pip.
Almost every deck published since has followed her, which means she did not just illustrate a deck. She set the visual grammar the entire field still uses.
Her images are arguments
Once you know a person drew these on purpose, small details stop being decoration.
In Five of Cups, the two upright cups are behind the figure. That placement is the card's whole meaning: what remains is present and not being looked at.
In Eight of Swords, the gap in the fence is enormous and the bindings are loose. The card is about a constraint that is more mental than physical, and Smith drew the evidence into the picture.
In The Devil, the chains around the two figures' necks are visibly loose enough to lift off. That is the card's argument, and it is an argument made in ink rather than in text.
When somebody tells you what a Rider-Waite-Smith card means, you can check it against the drawing. That is unusual in this field and it is worth using.
What happened to her
Smith converted to Catholicism, ran a holiday home in Cornwall with a companion, and died in 1951 in debt. Her possessions were sold to cover it. She has no known grave.
The deck she drew has sold in the millions and is the most reproduced set of occult images in the world.
That is not a moral to a story so much as a fact worth carrying. When people write about "the Rider-Waite deck", the missing name is the person who made the thing everybody actually recognises.
Why any of this matters for reading
Three practical reasons.
It tells you what is tradition and what is one man's opinion. Waite made choices. The Golden Dawn made choices. Knowing which is which lets you disagree with them intelligently rather than assuming the deck came down from somewhere.
It stops you overclaiming. A system assembled in the 1890s and drawn in 1909 is not ancient wisdom, and it does not need to be to be useful. What tarot is and is not covers where we think the honest line sits.
It makes the pictures readable. Every detail in a Smith minor was a decision. Reading the image is not a beginner's substitute for knowing the meaning; it is the method.
Frequently asked questions
Who created the Rider-Waite tarot deck? Arthur Edward Waite directed it and wrote the accompanying book, Pamela Colman Smith drew all seventy-eight cards, and William Rider and Son published it in 1909. It is more accurately called the Rider-Waite-Smith deck.
Why is it called Rider-Waite and not Rider-Waite-Smith? Because Smith was paid a flat fee and credited only by her initials on the cards. Adding her name is a recent and deserved correction.
How old is tarot? The cards date from fifteenth century Italy and were made for a trick-taking game. Divination with them begins in eighteenth century France, and the system most modern decks use comes from the 1890s.
What did Pamela Colman Smith change? She gave all fifty-six minor cards a scene. Before that, numbered cards were arrangements of suit symbols with nothing to interpret. Almost every deck since has followed her.
Why do Strength and Justice have different numbers in different decks? The Golden Dawn swapped them so the trumps would match the zodiac in order, and Waite followed. Marseille-pattern decks keep the original arrangement.
Is the Rider-Waite-Smith deck the best one to learn on? It is the one most books, courses and websites assume, including this one, so meanings transfer with the least friction. That is a practical argument rather than an aesthetic one.