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The Rider–Waite–Smith deck (1909)
The Rider–Waite–Smith deck is the tarot designed by the writer Arthur Edward Waite and drawn by the artist Pamela Colman Smith, published in London by William Rider & Son at the very end of 1909. It is the deck most English-language books teach from, and the ancestor of a great many modern decks. If you have ever seen a tarot card showing a scene — a figure grieving over spilt cups, a man carrying ten heavy staves — the picture almost certainly descends from this one.
What made it new
Before 1909, most tarot decks showed scenes only on the Major Arcana and the court cards. The numbered cards of each suit — the pips — showed their suit sign repeated in a pattern, as they still do in the Tarot de Marseille. Smith gave every one of the forty numbered cards a scene of its own, with people and places into which the right number of suit signs is worked. A beginner who draws the Five of Cups does not need to remember a list of meanings: a cloaked figure looking down at three spilt cups, with two still standing behind, says most of it.
Only one earlier deck had done anything similar: the Sola Busca tarot, engraved in Italy in the late fifteenth century, of which the British Museum acquired a full set of photographs in 1907. Several of Smith's designs, the Three of Swords and the Ten of Wands among them, clearly follow Sola Busca cards. Waite's own book describes the minor cards rather as an onlooker would, and historians generally credit their scenes mainly to Smith.
The Golden Dawn underneath
Waite and Smith were both members of the Golden Dawn, the London magical order whose system tied each card to a Hebrew letter, a planet, a sign or an element, and the numbered cards to the decans of the zodiac. The deck follows that structure while keeping most of the teaching out of sight, as Waite's oath of secrecy required. The clues are there for anyone who looks: rams' heads carved on The Emperor's throne for Aries, a crescent at the feet of The High Priestess for the Moon, the sign of Venus on The Empress's shield. Following the Order, it numbers Strength VIII and Justice XI, the reverse of the older French decks; Waite said only that the change was made for reasons that satisfied him.
The courts are a traditional King, Queen, Knight and Page rather than the Golden Dawn's King, Queen, Prince and Princess. The suits are Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles — Pentacles being Waite's name for the old suit of coins, drawn as discs bearing a five-pointed star.
The book and the name
Waite published The Key to the Tarot to accompany the deck in 1910, and an enlarged edition with all seventy-eight pictures, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, in 1911. It gives a short meaning for each card upright and reversed — many of the minor-card meanings come, by way of earlier French cartomancy, from Etteilla — and a ten-card method that became the Celtic Cross.
For most of the twentieth century the deck was sold as the "Rider" or "Rider-Waite" tarot, after its publisher and its designer; the artist was left out of the name. Many writers now call it the Waite–Smith or Rider–Waite–Smith deck to give Smith her due. "Rider-Waite" is today a trade name owned by a publisher of recoloured editions, so it is best kept for those editions.
In the tradition
The deck's influence is hard to overstate. Its scenes have been redrawn, recoloured, parodied and reimagined in thousands of later decks, so that for many readers "the meaning" of a minor card simply is what Smith drew. Readers of older or more esoteric decks sometimes find that a limitation — a scene can fix one meaning where the bare pip leaves several open — and readers of this deck sometimes find the bare pips of other decks hard to start with. Both are ways of reading, not a right and a wrong one.
In a reading here
The 1909 images are out of copyright, and Viastaro offers them as its "Smith-Waite" decks — Standard (the default), Restored, and Original 1909 — with Waite's own descriptions from The Pictorial Key among the sets of card meanings that can be chosen. The astrology shown for each card follows the Golden Dawn, as this deck does.