About the 1909 deck

The 1909 deck

Every card on this site comes from the deck that William Rider & Son of London published in 1909. It was designed under the direction of Arthur Edward Waite, a writer on mysticism and its history, and all 78 of its pictures were drawn by the artist Pamela Colman Smith.

For a long time the deck went by the publisher’s and the designer’s names as the Rider–Waite tarot. These days it’s more and more often called the Rider–Waite–Smith, which puts the artist back in the name.

In 1910 Waite published The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, a guide to the deck that describes each card and its meanings. The book is in the public domain too. The descriptions of the pictures on the card pages draw on it: they retell Waite in their own words and have been checked against the cards themselves.

Pamela Colman Smith

Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951) was an artist and illustrator. She was born in London to American parents, studied art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, illustrated books and worked in the theatre. She drew the tarot to Waite’s design, but it’s her pictures that made the deck so recognisable.

What Smith did differently was the minor arcana. Few earlier decks showed a scene on every numbered card; more often a minor card simply showed its suit symbols, five cups or seven swords. Smith gave almost every minor card a scene with people doing something; only the Aces show a hand reaching out of a cloud, the Three of Swords a heart pierced by three swords, and the Eight of Wands eight staves in flight over a valley. A figure in a black cloak stands over three spilled cups, with two more still standing behind. A young man gathers up swords while two others walk off towards the water. You can read a card like that even if you don’t remember its meaning: the picture tells you what it’s about.

Look in the corners and you’ll find her small monogram on many of the cards: at the bottom right of the Magician, for example, or of the Three of Wands.

Why this deck

First, these are scans of the 1909 edition. The site shows the drawings with their own line and colour; later editions often differ in colour. The scans are only resized and compressed so the pages load quickly. The site doesn’t recolour or redraw them.

Second, the drawings are now in the public domain. They can be shown freely, so each of the 78 cards appears here in full, at a good size, on a page with its meaning.

Third, this is the deck many people learn tarot from. Smith’s scenes are repeated in a great many modern decks, so once you know these 78 pictures, you’ll find it easier to recognise the cards in other decks too.

The numbers on the site are the ones printed on the 1909 cards. Waite swapped two cards: in his deck Strength is VIII and Justice is XI, while the Marseille tradition has them the other way round. The pages for those two cards carry a short note about it.

Where the scans come from

The scans of all 78 cards come from Wikimedia Commons, from the category “Rider-Waite tarot deck (Roses & Lilies)”, where they’re marked as public domain. The table of sources on this page lists, for each card, the file, a link to its page on Commons and its licence.

The short card meanings on the site are the same as in the Arkana bot and its Mini App. The longer texts were written for this site and build on them, and the spread pages use the same positions as the bot.