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Pamela Colman Smith, and Who Made the Deck

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Pamela Colman Smith, and Who Made the Deck

The deck that taught most living readers what the cards look like was drawn by a woman whose name was left off it for most of a century, and the record is worth stating plainly.

Pamela Colman Smith was an artist, illustrator and theatrical designer, born in London and raised partly in Jamaica, who was working in the same occult circles as Arthur Edward Waite when he engaged her to produce a tarot. The deck appeared in December 1909, published by William Rider and Son. Waite supplied direction and a companion text; Smith drew all seventy-eight cards, including the fifty-six minor cards which she had to invent from almost nothing, since no widely available deck before hers gave the pips full scenes.

For decades the deck was called the Rider-Waite, naming the publisher and the author and omitting the artist. The name Rider-Waite-Smith, now standard in careful usage, is a comparatively recent correction, and the scholarship recovering Smith's life and work, most substantially the volume assembled by Stuart Kaplan and his collaborators and published in 2018, is more recent still.

The correction matters interpretively and not only ethically. A very large proportion of what readers take to be the meaning of a card is in fact a decision Smith made at her drawing board in 1909: a gesture, a background, a figure looking one way rather than another. Attributing those decisions to Waite, or to tradition, or to antiquity, misdescribes where the meaning came from. She made it up, and she made it up well.

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