Games 1971 printing is probably the closest to the original that’s available now. The original plates were destroyed during WWII, and Smith’s original drawings have disappeared, so the U.S. acquired exclusive rights to the Rider Waite name in 1971. The deck must have been instantly popular since the book and deck were pirated by American publisher DeLaurence in 1916. The lack of overt occult attributions and the Christian symbolism set this deck apart from other occult decks of the time such as the Egyptian decks or Oswald Wirth’s deck. Most importantly, Waite does not associate the Hebrew alphabet with the cards, which is the essence of occult Tarot. The card meanings are drawn partly from the Golden Dawn and partly from Etteilla. The Major Arcana are based on the Tarot de Marseilles with flourishes from Eliphas Levi’s descriptions and Waite’s personal symbolism. The minor Arcana images illustrate a hodge-podge of influences from Etteilla, The Golden Dawn’s Book T, The 15 th century Sola Busca deck in the British Museum, and Smith’s own imagination. His divinatory meanings draw heavily on Etteilla. Waite based his Major Arcana imagery on Eliphas Levi’s and Paul Christian’s Egyptianized descriptions of the trumps, as well as Christian symbolism and Golden Dawn astrological attributions. The deck contains many echoes of Smith’s illustration style, which shows she had a good deal of autonomy in creating the Minor Arcana images.Īlthough both Waite and Smith had been members of the Golden Dawn, they did not create a Golden Dawn deck. We know that Smith did research in the British Museum, because she lifted some images directly from the 15 th century Sola Busca deck in the museum’s collection (notably the 3 of Swords and 10 of Wands). Recently, the tarot community has been correcting this injustice by referring to the deck as the Rider Waite Smith (RWS) or Waite Smith deck (WS). She not only didn’t benefit financially from the deck, but the publisher’s name was put on the deck instead of hers. He chose her for the job because of her talent, their common membership in the Golden Dawn, and because he believed her clairvoyant abilities would help her perceive the higher mystical truths he was attempting to convey with his deck. In 1909, Waite paid Smith a flat fee for illustrating his Tarot deck. She was also known for going into a trance and channeling drawings while listening to music, many years before the surrealists experimented with automatism in art. B Yeats and his brother on various literary and theatrical projects illustrated sheet music, advertisements, and children’s books and published illustrated literary magazines. During the high point of her career, from 1890 to 1910, she collaborated with W. ![]() ![]() In 1901 she acquired a London studio where she entertained her artistic and literary friends by dressing up in costume and telling Jamaican folk tales with an ethnic accent while using a miniature cardboard theater as a prop. She studied art at the Pratt Institute in New York then toured with an English theater company as a costume and set designer. Pamela Colman Smith was born in London to American parents and spent part of her childhood in Jamaica. In 1909, he created the Rider Waite Tarot in collaboration with Pamela Colman Smith, and wrote the accompanying book, The Pictorial Key to Tarot (PKT). When the Golden Dawn splintered into factions, he created his own order, the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. His fascination with the occult scene drew him into membership in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, but his spirituality gradually evolved away from ceremonial magic and toward Christian mysticism. In 1889, under the pseudonym Grand Orient, he published A Handbook of Cartomancy, Fortune-Telling and Occult Divination, one of the first books in English on how to read tarot. Waite, the creator of the world’s most influential Tarot deck, was a spiritual seeker and mystic who supported himself with freelance translation and writing.
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