The revolution in the modern tarot came and came with little fanfare – and little compensation – for two artists in the United Kingdom, both with deep ties with Brooklyn. In December 1909, William Rider & Son published a card game simply called “the tarot“, Developed by Arthur E. Waite, poet and mystical born in Brooklyn, and Pamela Colman Smith, an educated artist and girl of two Brooklynites. Smith illustrated the game, and Waite established the interpretation guide and the directives, and they would have received a very small payment for their work.
They did not know that in 1973, their deck would play a key role in Live and let dieA James Bond film from the Roger Moore time appears on the cover of the Bob Dylan LP DesireAnd be sold by millions, inspiring countless remixes and reinterpretations that continue to date. At that time, Waite and Smith had long happened (1942 and 1951, respectively), with perhaps only an ephemeral overview of the coming revolution.
I often tell a version of this story when I read tarot for customers worried about their ability to have a significant impact in their careers and with those around them. “We have no idea of the training effects we will have in this world,” I said, while we mix the cards together.
Waite and Smith's stories are at the heart of The tarot of Ae Waite and P. Colman Smith: The history of the most popular tarot in the worldPublished by Johannes Fiebig and written by Robert A. Gilbert, Mary K. Greer and Rachel Pollack. The book is accompanied by facsimiles of original Smith-Waite cards and The key to the tarotA small guide to interpret the cards.
The maps and the guide led a transition from the tarot far from a practice which required a memorization of fixed meanings and towards the possibility of individual interpretation and understanding. This change has allowed what is undoubtedly a renaissance in the tarot more than a century later, with new decks launched regularly on crowdfunding platforms and influencers on YouTube and Tiktok using tarot to give meaning to a rapidly evolving world.
The heaviest part of this heavy book – 444 pages – is a section that guides us through each card and the rich symbolism behind them, treating cards as design objects in themselves. In addition to offering possible interpretations, the book clarifies, for example, why the developers of the deck could have made certain decisions and what could have been their influences, which led to a study of a particular interest in artists and art historians.
A section on the Judgment cardFor example, focuses on naked figures at the bottom: “Looked at a considerable distance, we are all the same…. We are entering the naked world, and we are naked when we leave it. ” Reprints of Zakariya 'Ibn Muhammad al-Qazwini's Archangel Israfil And Hans Memling “The last judgmentTransmit the historical influences of art that shape the design of this card.
In a section on the Three of the cup cardWe see three women dancing with cups raised to each other. A more in -depth examination of these figures unpacking their meaning: “The three graces (set called charrites) are figures of Greek mythology. Their names are Euphrosyne (Joyeux), Thalia (Blooming) and Aglaea (Shining). “
An introduction tells us that the cards of Tarot came for the first time as a game in Italy in the 15th century – at the dawn of the Renaissance – at a time when ideas of self -determination and individualism were explored throughout art. A print of paint 1450 from Francesco de Stefano “The triumphs»Help us discover some of the representations of love, chastity and death that appear in Smith-Waite cards.
A fire test The tarotologist Rachel Pollack explains that Smith has made key artistic decisions that shed light on the continuous influence of cards. First of all, she illustrated the Arcana minor cards – combination cards in a standard tarot game at 78 cards – with figures and activities. Previously, most decks have represented these cards with costume images only (cups, swords, pentacles and chopsticks), similar to what we see in modern playing cards. This allowed cards to be more accessible to visual interpretation, rather than requiring esoteric knowledge and memorization.
Second, as Pollack points out, Smith has made the expression of each figure emotionally and thematically ambiguous: “Many people consider this lack of emotion defined as a weakness. The artists who create their own version of the cards can very clearly indicate what emotions they want the characters to show. For me, it often seems that they only succeeded in limiting possible interpretations. ”
The rich range of symbols and themes approved in the cards ensures that everyone has a “multi -personal” – thus supporting the possibility of interpreting them in different ways. As Waite wrote on the deck, it was an intentional part of his mystical practice: “You have to understand (…) that I was dealing with images in the photo; But the path of mystics finally leaves behind the figurative representations of the mind, because it is behind the kaleidoscope of external life that the soul is always light.
For me, which means that this book stands out from other stories and exams of the tarot, is how it emphasizes the creative process, giving meaning to the lasting popularity of Tarot today. The Smith-Waite deck is rightly criticized for having reinforced a binary of gender and institutions such as monarchy, with a strongly Western whole of symbologies. At the same time, the authors of the test treat cards as works of art in its own right, providing details such as the type of printing of the original game (chromolithography, if you were curious) and some of Smith's illustration work, to clarify the cultural context from which they emerged – and how they can in turn be transformed in the 21st century.
And the book presents the creators of the bridge as people with their own personal interests and creative stories – Smith, for example, was described in the 1909 edition of Brooklyn Life Thus: “(w) hen she entered the room that you feel like a little Kat Greenaway The girl had suddenly been equipped with life and came out of the covers of a book. She died a Catholic missionary in Bude, Cornwall, and is probably buried in an unmarked tomb.
The tarot of Ae Waite and P. Colman Smith: The history of the most popular tarot in the worldPublished by Johannes Fiebig (2023), is published by Taschen and is available online and in bookstores.
