History of Tarot: The Rider-Waite-Smith Deck

The deck in your hands — or on your screen — has a 600-year history, from Renaissance Italian parlors to Victorian occult lodges to the desk of a poet and an illustrator in Edwardian London. The Rider-Waite-Smith tarot, published in 1909, did not invent tarot, but it reinvented it: for the first time, every card told a pictorial story, making the deck readable by anyone willing to look. This is the story of how it happened.

The beginning: tarot as a game (1400s–1700s)

Tarot began not as a mystical tool but as a card game. In the 1430s–1450s, wealthy Milanese families commissioned hand-painted decks — the Visconti-Sforza tarot, the most famous surviving example, was painted with gold leaf for a duke's wedding. The game, called tarocchi, spread across Italy and France and is still played in parts of Europe today. For three centuries, the 22 trump cards (our major arcana) were simply the game's high cards, with allegorical images: the Pope, the Emperor, Death, the Devil, the World.

The Tarot de Marseille, standardized in the 1600s–1700s, became the visual template for centuries. Its minor arcana were 'pip' cards — the Seven of Swords showed seven swords, nothing more — and its trumps were bold, folk-art woodcuts. Nobody, as far as history can show, was using these cards for divination yet. They were for play, and the play was serious leisure for people who could afford hand-painted cards.

The occult reinvention (1780s–1900)

From parlor game to book of wisdom

In 1781, the French scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin published a fanciful claim: tarot was the surviving 'Book of Thoth,' an ancient Egyptian wisdom text. The Egyptology was fiction, but the idea was electric. Within years, the French occultist Etteilla created the first deck designed for divination and wrote the first tarot fortune-telling manual. Tarot's second life had begun.

Across the 19th century, French occultists — Eliphas Lévi, Papus, Oswald Wirth — wove tarot into the Western esoteric tradition, linking the 22 trumps to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the paths of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Tarot became, in their hands, not a game but an encyclopedia of hidden knowledge, a symbolic system for understanding the cosmos and the soul.

The Golden Dawn

The decisive chapter opened in 1888 with the founding of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in London — a magical society whose members included the poet W.B. Yeats and, crucially for our story, Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Colman Smith. The Golden Dawn synthesized the French occult tarot with Kabbalah, astrology, alchemy, and ceremonial magic into a complete spiritual curriculum, with tarot at its center. Its members studied the cards as a map of initiation: the Fool's journey as the soul's ascent.

Waite and Smith: the 1909 revolution

The poet and the artist

Arthur Edward Waite (1857–1942) was a scholar of mysticism, a Golden Dawn initiate, and a prolific writer on the occult. Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951) — known as 'Pixie' — was an artist, illustrator, and storyteller of Jamaican-Brooklyn-London background, a theater designer and suffragist whose vivid, economical style had already illustrated books of Jamaican folklore. In 1909, the publisher William Rider commissioned Waite to produce a new tarot deck; Waite brought in Smith to illustrate it.

The collaboration was extraordinary and, by the standards of the time, unusually credited: Smith's distinctive hand is visible on every card, and her initials appear on each one. She was paid a flat fee for the work — the standard arrangement then — and never shared in the deck's enormous later profits, a historical injustice the tarot community has spent recent decades working to correct by insisting on her name: Rider-Waite-Smith, not just Rider-Waite.

What made it revolutionary

Two innovations changed everything. First, Smith illustrated all 78 cards with full pictorial scenes — including the 56 minor arcana, which in the Marseille tradition had been plain pip cards. Suddenly the Three of Swords showed a heart pierced by three blades against a stormy sky; the Ten of Pentacles showed a whole multigenerational scene. Anyone could look at a card and begin to read it. This single change democratized tarot: it made the deck teachable, learnable, and readable by intuition as well as by memorized keywords.

Second, Waite restructured the deck's symbolism according to Golden Dawn teachings while writing The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911) as its companion — a text now in the public domain that remains the foundation of the deck's interpretive tradition. He swapped the traditional order of Strength and Justice (VIII and XI), wove in astrological and Kabbalistic correspondences, and gave the major arcana the psychological depth that later readers — from Jungians to modern reflective practitioners — would build on.

After 1909: the deck that ate the world

The Rider-Waite-Smith deck sold steadily for decades, then exploded with the 1960s–70s counterculture, when tarot became a symbol of alternative spirituality. In 1971, U.S. Games Systems began publishing it in America, and it has been in print continuously ever since — the best-selling tarot deck in history, the visual language of tarot itself. The vast majority of the thousand-plus tarot decks published since are, structurally, Rider-Waite-Smith decks in different artistic clothing: same 78 cards, same Fool's journey, same four suits.

The deck's imagery has also escaped the tarot world entirely: the Fool at the cliff's edge, the Death rider, the Tower struck by lightning — these are now global visual archetypes, appearing in films, album covers, and advertising, recognized by millions who have never held a deck.

The public-domain era

As of the 2020s, the original 1909 artwork is in the public domain in most jurisdictions (U.S. copyright on the 1909 publication has long expired; in the U.K. and EU, Pamela Colman Smith's 1951 death put her work into the public domain), and Waite's 1911 Pictorial Key with it. This is why you can find the classic imagery everywhere — in apps, books, and on sites like this one — and why a century of writers have been free to distill, reinterpret, and build on the tradition. The deck belongs to everyone now, which is exactly what Smith's accessible, democratic illustrations always invited.

Why it still matters

The Rider-Waite-Smith deck endures because it solved tarot's fundamental design problem: how to make 78 abstract concepts instantly readable. Smith's genius was narrative illustration — every card is a small story, a frozen moment of human experience: the figure carrying the heavy wands, the mourner before the spilled cups, the dancer in the wreath of the World. You do not need to memorize these stories; you recognize them, because you have lived versions of them.

That is also why learning this deck first is the standard advice in our beginner's guide: its images teach you as you use them, and its system underlies nearly every deck you will ever meet. Six hundred years from tarocchi to today, the deck remains what Smith made it — an invitation to look closely and see yourself.

Frequently asked questions

Who actually created the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot?

Arthur Edward Waite designed the deck's symbolism and structure; Pamela Colman Smith illustrated all 78 cards; publisher William Rider commissioned and published it in London in 1909. Modern usage gives all three credit — 'Rider-Waite-Smith' — with growing emphasis on Smith, whose artistic vision is the reason the deck works as well as it does and who was historically under-credited.

Is the Rider-Waite-Smith deck still under copyright?

The original 1909 artwork and Waite's 1911 text are in the public domain in most jurisdictions, which is why the classic images appear so widely. Note that specific modern editions — recolored versions, new guidebooks, altered artwork — may carry their own copyrights; the public-domain status applies to the original 1909 designs, not to every contemporary printing.

What came before Rider-Waite-Smith, and what came after?

Before: the 15th-century Italian hand-painted decks (Visconti-Sforza), the Tarot de Marseille (the 300-year standard), and the 19th-century French occult decks (Etteilla, Wirth). After: the Thoth deck (Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris, 1940s) as the great rival system, and then thousands of modern decks — the vast majority built on the Rider-Waite-Smith structure that Smith's illustrations made universal.

Keep exploring

• How to read tarot for beginners
• Tarot vs. oracle cards
• The Fool — the journey begins
• The Magician

Now that you know the deck's story, meet its characters. Draw your free daily card from the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition — or explore a full reading built on a century of its wisdom.