The 1909 William Rider & Sons Tarot

To understand the deck you have to begin with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the secret magical society founded in London in 1888. Its members — men and women alike, which was radical for the time — studied a synthetic system that wove together Kabbalah, astrology, alchemy, Egyptian symbolism and ritual magic. The tarot held a central place in that system: the order's private teachings assigned each of the twenty-two trumps to a Hebrew letter, a path on the Tree of Life, and an astrological sign or planet.

Two members of that order would make this deck. The first was Arthur Edward Waite (1857–1942), a scholarly, reserved mystic who had joined the Golden Dawn in 1891 and later led one of its successor bodies. The second was Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951), a young artist of Jamaican and English parentage who had grown up partly in Kingston, toured with a theatre company, and joined the order in 1901.

Waite was the deck's designer and its theorist. He had spent years translating and studying the French occultists — Éliphas Lévi above all — and writing on the Kabbalah, the Holy Grail and the hidden church he believed ran beneath ordinary religion. He was dissatisfied with the tarots available to him. The old Tarot de Marseille was, in his view, beautiful but muddled; the occult decks of Lévi's followers were doctrinaire and ugly.

He wanted a tarot that would carry the Golden Dawn's correspondences yet speak in plain pictures — "a deck which could be read," as he put it. Crucially, his great innovation was to insist that the forty numbered minor cards, which in older decks show only arrangements of wands, cups, swords and coins, should instead show human scenes: someone labouring, mourning, celebrating, leaving. That single decision is why the deck became readable by anyone, not only initiates.

Waite commissioned the pictures from Colman Smith in 1909, and she drew all seventy-eight in roughly six months, working under his direction but with considerable freedom. She was a genuine visionary artist: she spoke of music appearing to her as images, and her figures have a quick, theatrical line learned from years around the stage. Waite supplied the symbolism; she supplied the life.

She was paid a small flat fee and received no royalties. The publisher, William Rider & Son of London, issued the deck in December 1909 as The Tarot, with Waite's accompanying book The Key to the Tarot. Smith's name appeared only as a signature woven into the artwork itself — look for the small "PCS" monogram on many of the cards. Later editions popularised the pack under names that left her out entirely, and she died in relative obscurity in 1951. Today she is recognised as co-creator of the most widely used tarot in the world.

Beneath the plain pictures runs the Golden Dawn's hidden machinery. The Major Arcana carry the order's assignments: the Magician holds the tools of the four suits as the four elements; the High Priestess sits before a veil patterned with pomegranates, guarding the inner sanctuary; the Wheel of Fortune turns with the letters of the four-letter divine name among its spokes.

Waite also quietly rearranged two cards to fit the order's system: Strength and Justice trade places compared with the older Marseille order, so that Strength stands at eight and Justice at eleven. And he drew on his own preoccupations — the Grail legends, the mystical church — so the deck often reads less like a fortune-telling pack and more like a picture catechism of the Western mystery tradition, which was exactly his intention.

The result is a deck that works at two depths at once. A beginner can read the Five of Pentacles as hardship and exclusion from the picture alone. A student of the tradition finds the same card a study in the element Earth under strain. Neither reading cancels the other.

Nearly every popular tarot published since descends from this one, because Colman Smith's minor-card scenes solved the oldest problem in practical cartomancy: what to say when the card is simply the Six of Swords. Her answer — a figure ferried across grey water, swords standing in the boat — tells a story the reader can enter.

That is also why The Veil uses the original 1909 plates rather than any later recolouring: this is the deck as Waite and Smith released it, before a century of reinterpretation.

The card images reproduced here are scans of the original 1909 first edition, in the public domain in the United States and in Europe. They are hosted at Wikimedia Commons and are used unaltered but for scaling.