Rider-Waite
The Rider-Waite, more correctly Rider-Waite-Smith, is a tarot deck published in London in December 1909 by William Rider & Son, designed by the occultist Arthur Edward Waite and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. It has become the most widely circulated tarot deck in the world.
Origin and etymology
The name of the deck combines that of its publisher, William Rider & Son, and that of its designer, Arthur Edward Waite (1857-1942), an Anglo-American occultist and member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Waite entrusted the illustration to Pamela Colman Smith (1878-1951), another member of the Order, in 1909. The deck appeared in December 1909, accompanied a year later by The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), an interpretation guide written by Waite. The structure follows the traditional tarot: 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana, but with a decisive innovation: each Minor receives a complete figurative scene.
Evolution and tradition
The deck has gone through multiple reissues: the Pamela A version (1909), the Pamela B (1910), the Roses & Lilies, then the US Games Systems editions from 1971 onward, which spread it worldwide. Many variants have appeared: Universal Waite (1990), Radiant Rider-Waite (2003), Smith-Waite Centennial (2009) for the centenary. The visual grammar of the Rider-Waite has served as a model for hundreds of derivative decks, from the Robin Wood Tarot (1991) to the Modern Witch Tarot (2019). Aleister Crowley's Thoth deck (1944), designed by another member of the Golden Dawn, is its more esoterically charged counterpart.
Practical use
The Rider-Waite is today the standard teaching deck of tarot in the English-speaking world and increasingly in the French-speaking world. Its immediate readability, thanks to the figurative scenes of the Minors, makes it an ideal deck for beginners. The standard meanings published by Waite, expanded by Eden Gray (1960) and then Rachel Pollack (1980), form the most widely taught interpretive base. On Tarotoui, the Rider-Waite is available among the main decks, with its 78 cards documented upright and reversed. Many modern decks adopt its structure even when the aesthetic changes.
Going further
The name Rider-Waite undervalues Pamela Colman Smith's role, even though she signed each card with her initials PCS. A groundswell movement since the 2010s has called for the name Waite-Smith or RWS. Note also that Waite did not invent everything: he drew heavily on the inner teachings of the Golden Dawn and on the Etteilla tarot. Numbering Justice as VIII (instead of XI) is one of his innovations.