Rider–Waite–Smith Tarot

What is the Rider–Waite–Smith tarot?

The Rider–Waite–Smith tarot is a 78-card deck first published in London in 1909, designed by the occult scholar Arthur Edward Waite and drawn by the artist Pamela Colman Smith, and named after its publisher, William Rider & Son, together with its two creators. It is the deck most people picture when they hear the word tarot: the Fool stepping towards a cliff, the Tower struck by lightning, the Three of Swords with its pierced heart.

What set it apart was the Minor Arcana. Earlier decks in general use showed the numbered cards as simple arrangements of cups, coins, swords or batons. Smith drew a scene for each of the 40 numbered cards, so the Five of Cups became a cloaked figure mourning spilled cups, and the Eight of Swords a bound woman among blades. Those scenes turned the whole deck into something a reader could interpret from the pictures.

Feature	In the Rider–Waite–Smith deck
Major Arcana	22 cards, Fool numbered 0, Strength VIII and Justice XI
Suits	Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles
Court cards	Page, Knight, Queen, King
Numbered cards	a full illustrated scene on every card
System behind it	Golden Dawn correspondences: elements, planets, signs

The Larisa deck, Larisa’s own deck, has its own art; its meanings draw on the shared tradition that the Rider–Waite–Smith deck did so much to shape.

The history of the Rider–Waite–Smith deck

Waite and Smith both belonged to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the London society that had given tarot its links to Hebrew letters, elements and astrology at the end of the nineteenth century. Waite designed the deck within that framework, while keeping some of the order’s teachings veiled, and Smith turned his directions into images.

Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951) was an illustrator, stage designer and storyteller who drew the 78 cards in a matter of months in 1909. For many of the Minor Arcana she had more freedom than for the trumps, and she drew on many sources. Her Three of Swords, for example, closely follows the same card in the Italian Sola Busca deck of the 1490s, with three blades through a heart. She received little money or credit during her life; the use of her name in the deck’s title has grown only in recent decades.

In 1910 Waite published The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, which gave upright and reversed meanings for every card. From the late 1950s onward, American editions made the deck the global standard, and most later tarot decks either redraw its scenes or answer them.

Reading with the Rider–Waite–Smith images

Let the scene tell its story. Ask what is happening on the card: who is acting, what has just happened, what may come next. The Six of Swords is a crossing in a small boat; the Nine of Pentacles a woman alone in a well-kept garden. The scene is the first meaning.

Follow the details. Smith filled the cards with signals: the colour of a sky, the direction of a gaze, a small animal, a figure’s posture. Grey skies on many Swords cards, bright yellow behind the Fool and the Magician, water in almost every Cups scene.

Know the system underneath. Each Major carries a Golden Dawn correspondence, such as the Magician with Mercury or the Emperor with Aries, and each numbered card a planet in a sign. These links add a second layer for readers who want it.

Don’t mistake one picture for the only meaning. The RWS images are interpretations, not the cards’ only possible form. When you read another deck, read its own pictures; a meaning drawn from a detail Smith painted may not apply where that detail is absent.

Use the reversed meanings with care. Waite’s book gives a reversed meaning for every card, often as a kind of opposite. Many modern readers read reversals more flexibly, as a delay, an inward turn or the card’s shadow side, depending on the question.

Rider–Waite–Smith examples

Reading a scene: the Five of Cups. A cloaked figure looks down at three spilled cups, while two stand upright behind them and a bridge leads to a castle. The picture holds the whole meaning: grief is real, and something is still left, if one turns around.

A detail that changes the reading: the Ten of Swords. A figure lies under ten blades, yet the sky on the horizon is turning gold. Many readers take that dawn as the key: an ending that has fully happened, with the first light already on the horizon.

A Major in context: the Lovers. The RWS Lovers shows a man, a woman and an angel above them, rather than the young man choosing between two women seen in older decks. That change shifted the card’s meaning towards union and choice of values. In a relationship spread, it asks what the two people share at heart.

Carrying an RWS detail into another deck. A reader used to the RWS Eight of Cups, a figure walking away at night, finds a different image in another deck. The meaning of leaving behind what no longer satisfies remains; the night-time walk belongs to Smith’s version, not to the card itself.