The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot (1909)

Published 31 July 2026 · Updated 2 August 2026 · Reviewed by the Olivia Rivera

If you close your eyes and picture a tarot card — a robed magician with one arm raised, a sombre skeleton on horseback, three cups lifted in a toast — you are almost certainly picturing the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. Published in London at the close of 1909, it is the single most influential tarot ever made, and the template from which the great majority of modern decks descend. To learn the Rider-Waite-Smith is, in practical terms, to learn the visual grammar of tarot itself.

Its story is also a small act of historical justice. For most of the twentieth century the deck was known simply as the “Rider-Waite,” naming the publisher and the scholar while quietly erasing the woman who drew every card. Restoring Pamela Colman Smith to the title is not sentimental — it is accuracy.

Three names, three roles

The deck's compound name records a genuine collaboration. Rider was the publishing house, William Rider & Son of London, which issued the cards in December 1909. Waite was Arthur Edward Waite (1857–1942), the American-born, British-raised occult scholar who devised the deck's overall scheme and wrote its companion book. Smith was Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951), the artist — known to friends as “Pixie” — who translated Waite's instructions into 78 finished, unmistakable images.

Both were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the influential magical society that shaped much of modern Western esotericism. It was almost certainly through the Order's circles that Waite and Smith met. Waite provided a written brief for each card, drawing on the Golden Dawn's system of astrological and elemental correspondences; Smith supplied the compositional genius, the faces, the colour and the drama. She is reported to have been paid a modest flat fee for the entire project, with no royalties — a striking imbalance given that her artwork went on to earn incalculable sums for others.

The Golden Dawn roots

The Rider-Waite-Smith did not appear from nowhere. It grew from the teaching deck and correspondences of the Golden Dawn, which mapped the 22 trumps to Hebrew letters and paths on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, and the four suits to the classical elements. Waite, however, was a cautious and idiosyncratic initiate. He reordered the trumps — most famously swapping the numbering so that Strength becomes VIII and Justice XI, aligning them with their zodiacal signs Leo and Libra — and he deliberately veiled or omitted certain correspondences he felt were not for public circulation.

The result is a deck that is Golden Dawn influenced rather than a straight transcription of its secret curriculum. This matters for readers: the RWS carries genuine esoteric structure, but Waite's editorial hand means it should not be read as a literal cipher of Golden Dawn doctrine. For the older stream that fed all of this, see our pages on the origins of tarot and the Tarot de Marseille.

The great innovation: illustrated pips

Here lies the deck's decisive break with the past. In earlier traditions such as the Marseille, the 56 minor cards — the pips numbered Ace through Ten in each suit — were shown as plain arrangements of their suit symbol: eight coins in rows, five swords crossed, and so on, much like the numbered cards in an ordinary pack. Reading them required memorising a table of meanings, because the images offered no story of their own.

Smith changed this completely. She illustrated every one of the 78 cards with a full narrative scene. The Ten of Swords shows a figure fallen beneath ten blades against a black sky; the Three of Swords, a heart pierced against grey rain; the Eight of Cups, a cloaked traveller walking away from stacked goblets beneath a waning moon. Suddenly the minor arcana could be read at a glance, intuitively, by anyone with eyes and empathy — no lookup table required.

It is worth noting that Smith was not working in a total vacuum: the fifteenth-century hand-painted Sola-Busca tarot, which she is believed to have studied at the British Museum, had scenic pip cards, and several of her compositions echo it. But no earlier deck had illustrated all the pips with such consistency, psychological depth and reproducible clarity. That combination is what made the innovation stick.

“The pictures are like doors which open into unexpected chambers.”
— A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910)

Symbolism conventions you can rely on

Part of the deck's power is its internal consistency. Once you learn its visual code, the same cues recur across the pack, which is why it works so well as a teaching tool:

• Suit elements. Wands relate to fire and action; Cups to water and emotion; Swords to air and intellect or conflict; Pentacles (coins) to earth, work and money.
• Colour and weather. Bright skies and yellow tones signal clarity or success; grey rain and black backgrounds signal grief or ending. Water in the background often marks emotional content.
• Numbers as a journey. Aces are beginnings, Fives are conflict or loss, Tens are completion (for good or ill). The pips tell a mini-story across each suit.
• Recurring figures. A white rose is purity or fresh potential; a lemniscate (the sideways figure-eight above the Magician and Strength) marks infinity and mastery; the mountains of the Cups suit hint at difficult truth.

These conventions are documented at length in Waite's own Pictorial Key, freely readable at sacred-texts.com, and they underpin nearly every beginner resource written since — including our own tarot for beginners guide and card entries such as Death.

Public domain — and a thousand clones

The original 1909 artwork is now in the public domain in the United States. That single legal fact explains a great deal about tarot today. Because anyone may reproduce, recolour or re-imagine the images without permission, the RWS became the base layer for an entire industry. Recoloured editions (the Universal Waite, the Radiant, the Smith-Waite Centennial), meticulous clones, and thousands of “RWS-based” independent decks all borrow its compositions and meanings.

This is why a person can pick up almost any modern deck and already half-understand it: the shared skeleton is Smith's. A word of care, though — public-domain status applies to the original artwork and chiefly under US law; individual modern recolourings, borders and companion texts may carry their own fresh copyright, and rules can differ in other countries.

Why it became the world standard

No single factor made the RWS dominant; several reinforced one another. The illustrated pips made it teachable. The companion book gave it authority. Its arrival in English, from a London publisher, placed it at the centre of the Anglophone occult revival. Later, US Games Systems' twentieth-century reprints put it in shops worldwide. And the public-domain artwork let it propagate freely into books, apps and rival decks. Network effects did the rest: the more people learned from it, the more new material was written around it, and the harder it became to dislodge.

Common misconceptions

• “Waite drew the cards.” He did not. Waite set the scheme and wrote the book; Smith drew all 78 cards. Crediting him alone is the very error the modern name exists to fix.
• “It is the oldest tarot deck.” Far from it. Tarot dates to fifteenth-century Italy; the RWS is a relatively recent 1909 deck. See our tarot myths debunked.
• “RWS is the ‘correct’ tarot.” It is the most common, not the only valid one. The Marseille and Thoth traditions are equally legitimate, with their own logic.
• “The public domain means anything goes everywhere.” The core artwork is free to use, chiefly in the US, but specific modern editions and their texts can still be under copyright.
• “It is a literal Golden Dawn deck.” Waite altered and concealed material; it reflects the Order without reproducing its full teaching.

Frequently asked questions