Waite, Smith and the Golden Dawn: the deck of 1909

The deck you draw your cards from on this site was illustrated in London in 1909. Behind it stand a secret order, a well-read mystic and an artist from the theatre circle around Ellen Terry. Arthur Edward Waite set the direction, and Pamela Colman Smith painted 78 pictures that were to change card reading. She was paid once, and for a long time her name appeared nowhere. This part tells how the Waite-Smith tarot came into being.

London 1888: an order for magic

In 1888 three London Freemasons, William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and William Robert Woodman, founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. It was based on coded manuscripts of uncertain origin, from which Mathers developed a system of grades with rituals and a curriculum of Kabbalah, astrology, alchemy and tarot. Unlike the Masonic lodges, the order admitted women on equal terms. Its members included the poet William Butler Yeats, the actress Florence Farr, the writers Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood and, from 1898, Aleister Crowley. Tarot was a central subject of study; the order had developed its own correspondences between the trumps and the Hebrew letters and signs of the zodiac, which differed from Lévi’s system. You can still see two consequences of this teaching today: the Fool stands at the beginning of the sequence, and Strength and Justice have swapped places eight and eleven. Around 1900 the order broke apart; from 1903 Arthur Edward Waite led one of its successor groups.

Arthur Edward Waite

Waite (1857 to 1942) was born in Brooklyn and, after the early death of his father, grew up in London. He worked as a clerk, read his way through the library of the British Museum and became one of the most prolific authors of English-language esotericism; among other things, he translated Éliphas Lévi. In 1891 he joined the Golden Dawn. Magical practice interested him little; he was looking for a mystical path and, as a sober-minded historian, expressly rejected the Egyptian and Roma legends of tarot. His aim was a “rectified” tarot: pictures that matched his reading of the symbols without openly revealing the secrets of the order. For this he needed an artist who knew the order’s tradition and was willing to follow his instructions.

Pamela Colman Smith

Pamela Colman Smith was born in London on 16 February 1878, the daughter of American parents. She spent her childhood in Manchester, Jamaica and Brooklyn. In Brooklyn, from 1893, she studied at the Pratt Institute under Arthur Wesley Dow, who trained his students on Japanese woodcuts: clear outlines, flat colours, bold cropping. Smith did not complete her studies but was already working as an illustrator, among other things of Jamaican folk tales, which she also performed herself. Back in England, she found her way into the circle of the Lyceum Theatre, the stage of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, whose manager was Bram Stoker. She designed costumes and sets, toured with the company, and Ellen Terry gave her the nickname “Pixie”. Smith illustrated books by Yeats, published the small magazine The Green Sheaf in 1903 and 1904 and was a well-known figure in London’s artistic circles.

One particular trait shaped her work: Smith saw music. When she listened to Bach, Beethoven or Debussy, colours and shapes appeared to her, and she painted them. In 1907 the photographer Alfred Stieglitz exhibited these music pictures in his New York gallery; she was the first painter whose work he showed there. In 1901, probably through Yeats, she had been admitted to the Golden Dawn, and after the split she followed Waite’s group. That made her exactly the person Waite was looking for.

The deck takes shape

In the course of 1909, Smith drew the 78 cards; the work probably took around six months. For the 22 trumps, Waite gave precise instructions: the Fool as a young man at the edge of a precipice, the Lovers as Adam and Eve beneath an angel, Strength in eighth place and Justice in eleventh. For the remaining 56 cards, he probably gave Smith a largely free hand. In December 1909 the deck was published by the London firm William Rider & Son, together with Waite’s small companion book The Key to the Tarot. In 1910 the expanded version The Pictorial Key to the Tarot followed, with Smith’s drawings in black and white; its title page bears the date 1911. Smith signed every card with her intertwined monogram. Her style is unmistakable: strong outlines like those of stained-glass windows, flat areas of colour, backgrounds like painted stage scenery and figures in poses reminiscent of actors.

The innovation: 56 scenes

Until then, the number cards of all common tarots showed only suit signs: five swords, seven coins, arranged ornamentally. Anyone who wanted to interpret them had to learn lists by heart. Smith gave every number card a scene: two freezing figures outside a lit church window on the Five of Pentacles, a man almost collapsing under ten wands, a heart pierced by three swords. This was not entirely without precedent. In 1907 the British Museum had acquired photographs of the Sola-Busca tarot of 1491, the only old deck with illustrated number cards; some of Smith’s motifs, such as the Three of Swords, clearly go back to it. But Smith turned a curiosity into a principle: her pictures tell stories, and anyone who looks at them understands something before opening a book. That made the deck the most successful tarot in history.

Payment, name, rights

Smith received a one-off fee for her work, which she described in a letter as very little money. She had no share in the sales. In 1911 she converted to Catholicism, later moved to Cornwall and lived on an inheritance, which she put into a house for holidaymakers and priests. The money was not enough. She died in Bude on 18 September 1951, in debt; her estate was auctioned off, and the location of her grave is unknown.

For a long time, the deck was named after its publisher: “Rider” was William Rider & Son. Today this name is protected as a trademark of a US publisher and, as a product name, belongs to that company. That is why we speak of the Waite-Smith tarot, and this is more than legal caution: it names the woman who made the pictures. Only since the 1970s, and increasingly since the deck’s centenary in 2009, has Smith’s contribution been widely recognised. In legal terms, the rule in the European Union is that a work enters the public domain 70 years after the death of its creator. Smith’s cards have been in the public domain since 1 January 2022, Waite’s texts since 2013. That is why you can draw here with the original pictures of 1909, freely and without a licence.