Tarot tradition
The Rider–Waite–Smith tarot
The deck most people picture when they hear the word tarot. A. E. Waite set the scheme and Pamela Colman Smith drew all seventy-eight cards; the London house of William Rider published them in 1909. Its quiet revolution was the minor arcana — where the older decks marked the small cards with bare arrangements of the suit, Smith gave each one a scene to read. Every card below links to its full meaning, shown in both traditions.
The twenty-two majors
The four suits
Wands
Fire · will and work
Cups
Water · feeling and relation
Swords
Air · thought and truth
Pentacles
Earth · matter and means
A scene on every card
This is what sets the Rider–Waite–Smith deck apart.
In the older Tarot de Marseille a Five of Coins is five coins arranged on the card — read from number and suit, not picture. Smith drew a scene for every minor instead: two figures passing a lit window in the snow, a hand reaching out of a cloud. You read the picture first and the number second. Smith was not the first to illustrate the small cards, but this is the deck that made scenes standard — and the reason it became the way most people learn to read at all.
The fifty-six minors
The four suits, ace through ten and the four courts — each one its own scene. Every card links to its meaning.
Pamela Colman Smith
For decades the deck was called simply “Rider–Waite,” and the artist who drew every line of it went unnamed. Pamela Colman Smith — “Pixie” — was an illustrator and theatrical designer who completed all seventy-eight cards in a matter of months in 1909, for a flat fee and no royalties. The images you know are hers.
Both Waite and Smith had passed through the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, whose correspondences sit quietly under the pictures. Naming her alongside them is the least the deck owes.