The Rider-Waite-Smith Deck

Published in London in 1909 by William Rider and Son, the deck was designed under the direction of Arthur Edward Waite and drawn in full by Pamela Colman Smith, an artist and illustrator who, like Waite, had been initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Its decisive innovation was to give the minor arcana fully illustrated scenes rather than the geometric pip arrangements of the older patterns; the Sola-Busca deck of the late fifteenth century had done something similar and Smith is generally thought to have seen it at the British Museum, but the Rider-Waite-Smith made scenic pips standard. Waite also exchanged the positions of Justice and Strength, numbering them XI and VIII, to fit the Golden Dawn's astrological attributions. The deck is by a wide margin the most influential ever made, and the great majority of decks published since are built on its imagery.