Pamela Colman Smith and the Tarot That Changed Everything

In the autumn of 1909, a young artist named Pamela Colman Smith completed one of the most consequential commissions in the history of illustration. Working in her London studio under the direction of the occult scholar Arthur Edward Waite, she produced seventy-eight watercolour drawings in a matter of months — one for each card of the tarot deck. The resulting deck, published by the Rider Company in December of that year, would go on to become the most widely used tarot in the world. It is still, more than a century later, the standard against which all other decks are measured. Smith's name did not appear on the original edition.

A Game of Courts: The Origins of Tarot

The tarot did not begin as a system of divination. It began as a card game.

The earliest tarot decks appeared in northern Italy in the first half of the fifteenth century, most likely in Milan, where the Visconti and Sforza families — the ruling dynasties of the duchy — commissioned elaborately painted decks for their own entertainment. The most celebrated of these, the Visconti-Sforza deck, was produced around 1450, probably to mark a dynastic occasion, and survives in fragments across several museum collections. Its cards are painted on vellum, gilded, and decorated with the heraldic symbols of the two families. They are objects of extraordinary luxury, made for people who could afford the finest things.

The game played with these cards — tarocchi in Italian — was a trick-taking game not unlike bridge, in which the trump cards (the trionfi, or triumphs) outranked the ordinary suit cards. The images on the trumps — the Fool, the Emperor, the Wheel of Fortune, the Hanged Man, Death, the World — were drawn from the visual culture of the late medieval and early Renaissance period: allegorical figures, theological concepts, the imagery of carnival and court pageant. They were not chosen for their occult significance. They were chosen because they were the images that a fifteenth-century Italian courtier would have found immediately recognisable and culturally resonant.

For the next three centuries, tarot remained primarily a card game, popular across Italy, France, and the German-speaking lands. It was played in coffeehouses and aristocratic salons, in monasteries and taverns. The images on the cards accumulated layers of association and interpretation, as images always do when they are handled and contemplated over long periods of time. But the systematic use of tarot for divination — for reading the future, exploring the psyche, or accessing hidden wisdom — came later, and from a different direction entirely.

From Game to Oracle: The Esoteric Turn

The transformation of tarot from card game to esoteric system happened in the second half of the eighteenth century, in France, among the occultists and Freemasons who were then constructing the elaborate symbolic architecture of Western esotericism. The key figure was Antoine Court de Gébelin, a Swiss pastor and amateur antiquarian who published, in 1781, a remarkable claim: that the tarot was not a European card game at all, but an ancient Egyptian text, a fragment of the lost Book of Thoth, preserved by gypsies and transmitted across the centuries in the form of playing cards.

Court de Gébelin was wrong. There is no evidence of any connection between tarot and ancient Egypt, and the claim has been thoroughly refuted by historians of playing cards. But the idea was irresistible to the occultists of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who were constructing elaborate systems of correspondence between Kabbalah, astrology, alchemy, and the Western magical tradition. The tarot's twenty-two trump cards mapped neatly onto the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The four suits corresponded to the four elements. The whole deck became a portable compendium of esoteric wisdom, a system for reading the hidden patterns of the universe.

By the time Arthur Edward Waite sat down to design a new tarot deck in 1909, this esoteric tradition was well established. Waite was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the most influential occult society in late Victorian Britain, whose members included W. B. Yeats, Aleister Crowley, and Pamela Colman Smith herself. He wanted a deck that would embody the Golden Dawn's synthesis of Kabbalistic, astrological, and alchemical symbolism — and he wanted it illustrated by someone who could translate that symbolism into vivid, accessible images.

Pamela Colman Smith and the Visual Revolution

Pamela Colman Smith was born in London in 1878, the daughter of an American father and a Jamaican-English mother. She grew up between England, Jamaica, and the United States, studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and returned to London in her early twenties, where she became part of the artistic and literary circles of the Edwardian avant-garde. She was a friend of Bram Stoker, an acquaintance of Yeats, a member of the Golden Dawn. She was also, by all accounts, a gifted and prolific artist with a particular talent for illustration and a deep interest in folklore, theatre, and the visual language of symbol.

What Smith brought to the Rider-Waite tarot was something that no previous deck had achieved: full pictorial scenes for all seventy-eight cards, including the fifty-six cards of the Minor Arcana. Before Smith, the Minor Arcana cards showed abstract arrangements of suit symbols — five cups arranged in a pattern, seven swords in a row — with no narrative content. Smith gave each card a scene, a figure, a moment. The Five of Cups became a cloaked figure mourning over spilled cups, with two full cups standing behind them. The Seven of Swords showed a figure sneaking away from a camp with an armful of swords. The Three of Cups depicted three women dancing in celebration.

This was a revolution. It made the psychological and emotional dimensions of each card immediately legible to anyone who looked at it, without requiring years of study in Kabbalistic correspondence or astrological symbolism. It democratised the tarot — made it accessible to the curious beginner as well as the initiated adept. And it established the visual vocabulary that virtually every subsequent tarot deck has drawn on, consciously or not.

The Artist Behind the Cards

Smith completed the seventy-eight drawings in approximately six months, working at extraordinary speed. She was paid a flat fee — the amount is not recorded — and received no royalties. The deck was published under Waite's name, with Smith credited only as the illustrator in small print. For most of the twentieth century, the deck was known simply as the Rider-Waite tarot. It was not until the late twentieth century, as feminist art historians began recovering the contributions of women artists, that Smith's name was restored to its proper place, and the deck began to be called the Rider-Waite-Smith.

Smith died in 1951, in Cornwall, in poverty. She had converted to Catholicism in 1911 and spent her later years running a rest house for priests. Her tarot illustrations, which had made the Rider Company a fortune, had made her nothing. Her estate was auctioned to pay her debts.

The injustice is real. But the work endures. The Fool still stands at the cliff's edge, pack on his shoulder, about to step into the unknown. The High Priestess still sits between her pillars, the scroll of wisdom half-hidden in her robes. The World still dances in her wreath of laurel, the four living creatures at the corners of the card. They are Smith's images — her hand, her imagination, her visual intelligence — and they have guided more seekers than she could ever have imagined.

Our Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot Journal reproduces Smith's 1909 illustrations across its covers — the complete 22 Major Arcana and Ace of Wands on the front, the Minor Arcana suits of Wands and Cups on the back.

References
Decker, R., Depaulis, T., & Dummett, M. (1996). A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot. St. Martin's Press.
Kaplan, S. R. (1978). The Encyclopedia of Tarot. U.S. Games Systems.
Pollack, R. (1980). Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom. Thorsons.
Groeer, M. K. (2002). Women of the Golden Dawn. Park Street Press.
Sharp, M. (2018). Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story. U.S. Games Systems.