Pamela Colman Smith

Born on this day in 1878, British artist Pamela Colman Smith. In 1909 Smith was approached by fellow member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Arthur Edward Waite to create a fully illustrated Tarot deck, both Major AND minor arcana, which had not really ever been fully executed. The 78+ drawings were completed within 6 months working from Waite’s very detailed descriptions of the Major Arcana but only general meanings of the minor, leaving much of the conceptual work for those cards to Smith, who actually used some of her friends as models. They were published the same year by William Rider and Son. The deck became known as the Rider-Waite Tarot and sometime just The Rider Tarot and Smith’s name became lost in connection with the project until fairly recently. It has become more proper to refer to the deck as the Rider-Waite-Smith deck or simply the Waite-Smith deck. I prefer to refer to it as the Smith-Waite deck. These are not merely a set of illustrations but a system upon which hundreds of not thousands of decks would be based on. We thank Pixie (as she was nicknamed) for her contribution to our spiritual life and practice.