The revolution in modern day tarot came and went with little fanfare — and little compensation — for two artists in the United Kingdom, both with deep ties to Brooklyn. In December 1909, William Rider & Son published a deck of cards simply called “the Tarot,” developed by Arthur E. Waite, a poet and mystic born in Brooklyn, and Pamela Colman Smith, a Pratt-educated artist and daughter of two Brooklynites. Smith illustrated the deck, and Waite established the interpretation guide and guidelines, and they reportedly received a very small payment for their labors.
Little did they know that by 1973, their deck would play a key role in Live and Let Die, a Roger Moore-era James Bond film, appear on the cover of Bob Dylan’s LP Desire, and be sold by the millions, inspiring countless remixes and reinterpretations that continue to this day. By then, both Waite and Smith had long since passed (1942 and 1951, respectively), with perhaps only a fleeting glimpse of the revolution to come.
I often relate a version of this story when doing tarot readings for clients anxious about their ability to make a meaningful impact in their careers and with those around them. “We have no idea the ripple effects we will have in this world,” I say, as we shuffle the cards together.
The narratives of Waite and Smith are central to The Tarot of A. E. Waite and P. Colman Smith: The Story of the World’s Most Popular Tarot, edited by Johannes Fiebig and authored by Robert A. Gilbert, Mary K. Greer, and Rachel Pollack. The book is accompanied by facsimiles of the original Smith-Waite cards and The Key to the Tarot, a small guide to interpreting the cards.
Both the cards and the guide led a transition of the tarot away from a practice that required memorization of fixed meanings and toward the possibility of individual interpretation and understanding. That shift enabled what is no doubt a renaissance in tarot over a century later, with new decks launched regularly on crowdfunding platforms, and influencers on YouTube and TikTok using tarot to help make sense of a rapidly changing world.
The heftiest part of this hefty book — 444 pages — is a section that guides us through each card and the rich symbolism behind them, treating the cards as design objects in themselves. In addition to offering possible interpretations, the book clarifies, for example, why the deck developers might have made certain decisions and what their influences might have been, resulting in a study of particular interest for artists and art historians.
A section about the Judgement card, for instance, focuses in on the nude figures at the bottom: “Looked at from a considerable distance, we are all the same …. We enter the world naked, and we are naked when we leave it.” Reprints of Zakariya’ ibn Muhammad al-Qazwini’s Archangel Israfil and Hans Memling’s “The Last Judgement” convey the art historical influences that shape the design of this card.
In a section about the Three of Cups card, we see three women dancing with goblets raised toward each other. A closer look at these figures unpacks their significance: “The three Graces (together referred to as the Charites) are figures from Greek mythology. Their names are Euphrosyne (joyful), Thalia (blooming), and Aglaea (shining).”
An introduction tells us that the tarot cards first came about as a game in Italy in the 15th century — at the dawn of the Renaissance — in a time when ideas of self-determination and individualism were explored throughout art. A print of Francesco de Stefano’s 1450 painting “I Trionfi” helps us discover some of the depictions of love, chastity, and death that appear in the Smith-Waite cards.
An essay by the late tarotologist Rachel Pollack explains that Smith made key artistic decisions that inform the cards’ ongoing influence. First, she illustrated the Minor Arcana cards — the suit cards in a standard 78-card tarot deck — with figures and activities. Previously, most decks depicted these cards with the suit images only (cups, swords, pentacles, and wands), similar to what we see in modern day playing cards. This allowed the cards to be more accessible to visual interpretation, rather than requiring esoteric knowledge and memorization.
Secondly, as Pollack points out, Smith made every figure’s expression emotionally and thematically ambiguous: “Many people consider this lack of defined emotion as a weakness. Artists who create their own version of the cards may make very clear what emotions they want the characters to show. To me it often seems they have succeeded only in limiting the possible interpretations.”
The rich array of symbols and themes baked into the cards ensures that each one has “multi-perspectivity” — thus supporting the possibility of interpreting them in many different ways. As Waite wrote of the deck, this was an intentional part of his mystical practice: “It should be understood […] that I have been dealing with pictured images; but the way of the mystics ultimately leaves behind it the figured representations of the mind, for it is behind the kaleidoscope of external things that the still light shines in and from within the mind, in that state of pure being which is the life of the soul in God.”
To me, what makes this book stand out from other histories and examinations of the tarot is how much it emphasizes the creative process, making sense of tarot’s enduring popularity today. The Smith-Waite deck is rightly critiqued for reinforcing a gender binary and institutions like the monarchy, with a strongly Western set of symbologies. At the same time, the essay authors treat the cards as works of art in their own right, providing details like the original deck’s type of printing (chromolithography, if you were curious) and some of Smith’s illustration work, to clarify the cultural context from which they emerged — and how they can in turn be transformed in the 21st century.
And the book presents the deck’s creators as people with their own personal interests and creative histories — Smith, for example, was described in the 1909 edition of Brooklyn Life thusly: “[W]hen she entered the room you felt as if a little Kat Greenaway girl had suddenly been endowed with life and walked right out from the covers of a book.” She died a Catholic missionary in Bude, Cornwall, and is probably buried there in an unmarked grave. Thanks to her work, I continue to feel her light up the room every time I open the cards she so richly illustrated.
The Tarot of A. E. Waite and P. Colman Smith: The Story of the World’s Most Popular Tarot, edited by Johannes Fiebig (2023), is published by Taschen and is available online and in bookstores.
