A Brief History of the Rider-Waite-Smith Deck

Every card illustrated on this site traces back to a single deck published in London in 1909 by William Rider & Son. For most of the twentieth century it was simply called the "Rider-Waite" deck, after the publisher and the occultist who designed its symbolism, Arthur Edward Waite. Only in recent decades has the deck's actual illustrator, Pamela Colman Smith, been added to its name — hence "Rider-Waite-Smith," or RWS — a correction that's as much a piece of the deck's real history as its original publication.

Waite was a British occultist and member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the same secretive esoteric society that shaped much of the symbolic and astrological framework this site's card correspondences still draw on (see our methodology page for the sourcing detail). By the early 1900s, Waite had grown dissatisfied with the tarot decks then in circulation — chiefly the Tarot de Marseille tradition, whose Minor Arcana cards showed only suit symbols arranged in a pattern (four cups, seven swords, and so on) rather than any illustrated scene. Waite wanted a deck built to carry a fuller esoteric teaching, and he needed an artist who could translate that intention into image.

He found that artist in Pamela Colman Smith, a British-American illustrator, also a Golden Dawn initiate, who worked in theatrical and literary circles that included Bram Stoker (she illustrated for London's Lyceum Theatre, which Stoker managed) and poet W. B. Yeats. Waite gave Smith a set of instructions and symbolic guidelines, but the specific visual execution — the exact posture of the Hanged Man, the particular arrangement of swords around the bound figure in the Eight of Swords, the cliff-edge composition of the Fool — was Smith's own design work. It's this decision that makes the RWS deck genuinely distinct from what came before it: Smith illustrated all 56 Minor Arcana cards with full narrative scenes, not just suit symbols, which is why a new reader today can often make a reasonable guess at a Minor Arcana card's meaning just from looking at the artwork, long before memorizing any keyword list.

Smith's contribution went underrecognized for most of the century that followed. She was paid a one-time flat fee for the commission rather than an ongoing royalty on a deck that would go on to sell in the millions, and for decades the deck carried only Waite's name in its common shorthand, with Smith's role reduced to a production credit at best. It wasn't until later scholarship — much of it from tarot historians and feminist art critics working from the 1970s onward — pushed to have her name formally restored to the deck's popular name that "Rider-Waite-Smith" started to become the more accurate, more commonly used term, which is the convention this site follows throughout.

The deck's path to its current ubiquity involves one more real historical detail worth knowing: its original UK copyright eventually lapsed, and in the United States the deck entered the public domain, which is a significant part of why RWS-style artwork is so widely reproduced today, including on this site (see our methodology page for exactly how that public-domain status applies to the images used here). U.S. Games Systems republished the deck in 1971 under the "Rider-Waite Tarot" name, and that edition is largely responsible for cementing RWS as the default visual reference most modern readers, books, and other decks work from or riff off of — including the many "clone" decks that keep RWS's compositions but restyle the art.

The 1909 deck's public-domain status also explains something that confuses a lot of newer readers browsing for their first physical deck: there isn't one single "Rider-Waite-Smith deck" for sale today, there are dozens of editions, all reproducing Smith's original compositions with varying degrees of faithfulness to her original colors and line work. Some, like the "Universal Waite" edition, recolor the artwork with softer, more muted tones than Smith's original bold palette; others print as close to the 1909 originals as photographic reproduction allows. None of these is more "authentic" in a way that changes the cards' actual meanings — the underlying scene Smith composed for each card is identical across editions, only the rendering style differs. Our guide to choosing your first tarot deck covers what's actually worth weighing between these editions versus what's mostly aesthetic preference.

It's worth being honest about a few things this history doesn't establish, since tarot's popular mythology sometimes overstates its own past. The deck's imagery draws on much older material — tarot cards as a card game trace back to 15th-century Italy, centuries before anyone used them for divination, and our History of Tarot piece covers that longer, non-occult backstory in full. And while Waite and Smith embedded real esoteric symbolism into the 1909 deck, there's no historical evidence the deck's 1909 creators laid out an authoritative "Fool's Journey" narrative connecting all 22 Majors — that's a later interpretive framework, one we cover honestly as such in The Fool's Journey: The Major Arcana as a Story, rather than treating it as something Waite or Smith explicitly intended.

Knowing this backstory changes how a few cards read, in a small but real way. The Eight of Cups' figure walking away under a hooded cloak, the Nine of Swords' anguished figure sitting up in bed, the Ten of Pentacles' three generations gathered at a threshold — these are all Smith's specific compositional choices, made under Waite's symbolic direction but rendered by her own hand, and it's worth remembering that the emotional specificity you're reading into a Minor Arcana scene is very much a real artist's deliberate storytelling, not an incidental byproduct of a suit-and-number system. The deck you're using today, more than a century after its first printing, is still fundamentally Smith's visual interpretation of Waite's esoteric framework — a genuine two-person collaboration, even though only one of those two names was widely credited for most of that century. Reading the deck with that history in mind is, in a small way, part of correcting it — attention finally paid to the choices a real illustrator made, more than a hundred years on.