Rider Tarot (RW/RWS) - "The original Tarot"?

I see it in many places lately.

"You have to start with the original deck".

"It is best to learn the original deck first."

"You should not buy any other deck before you learned the meanings in the traditional deck."

Well-intended advice, indeed.

They are all talking about the Raider-Waite Tarot Deck, obviously. The One and Only.

Only it isn't.

What the Rider-Waite is, and what it isn't

The Rider deck is neither an old tarot deck, nor is it the original one. It is a good deck, absolutely! In some respects, it is marvelous. And for sure, it is the most used deck in modern times.

But the original deck? Well, not quite. In fact, it is not even very old, compared to the tradition of tarot and cartomancy. 

Its rich universe of symbols and references has stuck with us and we like it. It is the deck many, many modern creators are inspired by, to make their own versions, adhering to the scenes presented in the Rider deck. That way, the Rider has become an even more famous deck, a deck we all came to know and love.

Regardless of our liking, I think it is time for a small write-up of the history of the Raider-Waite deck. For all new tarot readers out there, who are mistakenly told that the RW is the original tarot.

The first known tarot deck

The first tarot deck we know of, stems from Italy, about 1450 AD. In resembled other playing cards, and were used to play the game Tarocchi. Most likely, these cards were also used for divination purposes, just like the deck of normal playing cards. Already by the late 16th century, the tarot had settled into the deck we know today - 78 cards, of which four suits, 40 pips, 16 court cards, and 22 trump cards. But the history of tarot and playing cards, is for another article.

Fast forward thus, approximately 300 years, to the creation of the Rider-Waite deck.

A tale of the Golden Dawn

Picture this: London, late 1800s. A dark, cold basement (I am making this scene up), filled with incense and cigar smoke. In the middle of the room, a table with old books and scribbled notes. Spiders in the corners, wax candles burning, a red velvet couch.

Some like-minded people are gathered. Some of these people are writers. Some are artists, actors, some unemployed, probably a dancer as well. There are doctors, teachers, poets. Some are well-respected members of society, some are unheard of.

These people love all things esoteric, hidden, magic. They engage in all sort of esoteric activities and teach each other as they go along. They love to discover old text and research belief systems, religions and world views; they are highly inspired by the Jewish Kabbalah, the Gnostic gospels, esoteric Christianity, ancient Egyptian religion, different religious cults, astrology, paganism. Many of them love magic rituals, secret signs, talismans, cartomancy, dowsing and so forth. A Macedonian salad of everything magic and esoteric. We can ony imagine, it was a rather eccentric crowd.

Who are they? They are, a fraction of the secret society, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Among them, was Arthur Edward Waite.

And in this scene, the idea of the Raider deck was born.

The creation of the Rider-Waite tarot deck

Arthur Edward Waite was a writer, a poet and a Freemason. He was deeply interested in everything esoteric and occult, and his writings about these subjects were many. Some people reckon Waite as the first who tried to systemize Western occultism and to acknowledge it as a spiritual tradition of its own.

Waite was a great fan of Eliphas Levi (not his real name btw), a French occultist and ceremonial leader, who wrote several books about spiritism and magic. Waite wrote several pieces about Levi, and just before Waite started to work on the Raider Tarot, he translated Levi's book Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie from French to English.

Levi had a solid influence on the development of Western occultism and spiritualism. His legacy continues to show up in the modern popular culture of occultism today, i.a by the use of the reversed pentagram as a sign for the Devil/dark force, which was Levi's idea. Levi included divination with Tarot as an element in his magic system. Maybe this, was the reason Waite came up with the idea: To make a new tarot deck.

(Waite was, however, not the only one thinking exactly that, in exactly that time. Stanislas de Guiata advised Oscar Wirth already in 1887, to "restore the 22 arcanas of the Tarot to their hieroglyphical purity". Stanislas was too, a reader of Levi's Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie.)

Waite was a poet and a writer, but he could not really draw. He recruited an illustrator to do the actual artwork and drawing for the cards, Pamela Colman Smith. Smith was a member of the Golden Dawn from 1901, but some research indicates that she was loosely connected, probably not having access to the secret teachings and writings of the order.

Waite's influence on the deck

It was Waite, who had the esoteric knowledge. Waite instructed Smith in her work, telling her what he wanted included in each card; which symbols, which references to religious and spiritual traditions and so on., The deck most people used those days, was the deck made by the two Freemasons, Court de Gébelin and his friend Comte de Mellet. This deck had imagery only in the court cards and the Major Arcana. For this reason, was Waite also more interested in the Major Arcana. His vision was to improve and develop the work of Gebelin and Mellet, to perfect the esoteric and occult references, and he also wanted to connect the cards to Astrology.

The Minor Arcana, was mostly left to Smith's creativity and inspiration.

The deck came out on Raider & son publishing house in 1909, after Smith's illustrative work was rushed over the finish line. Critics of the deck has mentioned the obvious signs of hastly work in the pip cards - probably because when the Major Arcana as done, Waite wanted to move forward.

Smith's influence on the deck

Smith had less knowledge of occult traditions, spiritism and esoteric topics, she was more interested in the theatre and the arts. So when she was told to finish the pips, she drew inspiration from her own private life and the life of her friends, many of the scenes stemming from the theatre. In fact, there are as many as 13, which some call "the stage cards". Many theories have evolved around these cards, trying to explain esoterically and mystically why they are staged.

But the truth could be quite simple. Smith lost both her parents before she was 21. At the time of illustrating the Raider Tarot, Smith stayed with an older lady, an actor and bohemian, living in the outskirts of London. The actor had a shed in the yard where she put up a simple installation for acting, a theatre scene. Smith used to sit in the audience and draw what was going on at stage. The illustrations on the stage cards, could very well be from these days at the "theatre".

The peculiar result of this division of interest and tasks, is that the Major Arcana is much more loaded with symbols, religious references and esoteric messages, that what the pip cards are.

A new kind of deck was born

In sum, Waite was mostly occupied with making esoteric connections, finding connections between diverse mystic traditions and reference them all into the deck of the new tarot. He included symbols from astrology, kabbalah, paganism and western occultism into the cards, trying to work with the secret knowledge of the Freemasons, Eliphas Levi's knowledge of the Kabbalah, and making the cards fit into the world of astrology. Waite even switched places for two of the cards in the Major Arcana (Justice and Strength), to make it work better with the astrology. In my opinion, the rich selection of symbols, the references to ancient mystic traditions, to esoteric fractions of world religions, to Kabbalah, to religious myths, alchemy, occultism and spiritism is mostly the work of Arthur Edward Waite, inspired both by the Tarot de Marseille and Waite's life in the bohemian world of the Golden Dawn.

It is not always I find that the heavy use of esoteric symbols in the RW Major Arcana add so much to the cards. Many become very occupied with the "hidden secrets" in the RWS. To me, the heavy use of symbols is often just noise. Especially when we know that Waite was such a huge fan of Eliphas Levi, and that the Golden Dawns in general were so fascinated by freemasonry, I find the secret symbolism stuff a bit forced and artificial.

Before Raider-Waite, the tarot decks were also portraying personalities like archetypes. Even from the very early decks of the 15th century, we find personas such as Hope, Faith, Death, Empress and Fool. To me, that is sufficient for channeling the universal energy of those archetypes. I do not personally, need the secret alchemy of the Kabbalah to access those core principles.

The true gift of the Raider-Waite-Smith

What impresses me more about the Raider-Waite, is the way the deck made the pip cards come to life. Even though the Raider Tarot was not the first tarot deck, nor the original for the tarot system of divination that we know today, Smith and Waite did something that few others had done. The detailed imagery for all the pip cards, contributes to telling a visual story of the minor arcana, the suits and the meaning of each card.

There are earlier decks showing this concept in the pips, most known is the Sola Busca deck from Italy, which Waite and Smith most certainly took inspiration from. This deck was created in the late 16th century, gifted to the British Museum in 1907 - only two years before the Rider Tarot was published. One can imagine Smith and Waite had seen them there when exhibited.

Although the idea of decorating the pip cards was not new, the scenes and visualizations drawn by Smith, surely make reading the tarot much easier compared to other known decks at the time. The stories of the pips was a huge improvement for easy reading and accessibility for all to use the tarot for divination, and not only for playing games.

Creating imagery and artwork on all the cards, following a system of numerology and also astrology, telling a visual story of the minor arcana as well as of the major, was a great contribution and improvement to the tarot, and laid the ground for how the tarot is used in modern reading.

In this sense, it could be spoken of as an original. The inventive work with the pip cards - much more than the extensive use of symbols and references to various esoteric belief systems - is in my opinion the true gift of the Rider-Waite deck.