Honouring Pamela Coleman Smith
Illustrating the Arcane…Whose Name on the Cards?
Birthdays can be most useful. Particularly, because they permit busy-bodies such as myself to correct history under the polite guise of celebration. Today is the birthday of Pamela Coleman Smith. Pamela’s work has been handled, shuffled, breathed upon, and solemly consulted by millions who could not pick her out of a line-up of Edwardian librarians. Many a mystic, dilettante, sceptic, poet, cartomancer and scorned ex-lover will be familiar with, and may even own her works. Yet I doubt not half of them know her name, No Longer!
Smith, known affectionately as Pixie, was born in London on the 16 February 1878. An American, she spent her childhood between the UK, New York, and Kingston Jamaica, before returning to England after art school. Here are just some of the things she got up to after then:
She painted visions inspired by music, exhibiting in New York before the age of 30
She toured with a theatre company, designing costumes and sets
She was a suffragist and WWI Red Cross artist
She was a folklorist preserving Jamaican Anansi stories
She ran The Green Sheaf Press, publishing women’s voices when few would
She never married
Basically, she was iconic. She was also an occultist hanging out with many of the other hot occultists on the scene…think Bram Stoker & WB Yeats. It was through her interest in arcane realms that she joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and encountered Arthur Edward Waite. Waite was an a scholar of mysticism with a desire to revamp some cards into a spiritual system. He conceptualised a Tarot deck which would embody his esoteric philosophy, he invited Smith to illustrate it. A historic move for the cards and a curiously modest move for Smith’s credit.
In 1909, in under 6 months, she painted all seventy-eight cards of what is widely called the Rider-Waite Tarot. Each card a miniature theatre. Figures mourn, celebrate, worry, travel, collapse, rejoice, and contemplate existential weather. Smith breathed life into the cards; most notably the minor arcana, which many previous decks had treated like accounting slips with symbols. Smith gave each of them plots, turning abstract suits into plays for the reader to recognise, illuminating the unconscious scripts we all follow.
Waite commissioned the cards and wrote the guidebook. The publisher (William Rider & Son) printed the cards. Posterity remembered both with admirable efficiency by way of a double barrel - The Rider-Waite Deck… Smith, meanwhile, slipped into the footnotes like an unthanked guest leaving a party she had catered, decorated, and hosted.
Frankly the irony burns and reeks of boring misogyny. Every reading done, and thousands of decks designed since, have relied upon her decisions. The posture of the fool, the position of the swords, hundreds of details influencing the intuitive way humans have connected with the cards. Whilst, Waite translated the meanings of the cards, Smith created the language and the interface with which people have communed and within which those meanings could exist.
Recently, some readers and historians have begun using the term Waite-Smith deck, a name that has the pleasant duty of being true and just. It restores the artist to the object she imagined and created, acknowledging that symbols require hands to draw them.
Smith died in 1951 with modest means and immodest influence. Her cards continued to travel, tucked into velvet bags and desk drawers, consulted under candle and electric light alike. They have somewhat secretly carried her line-work into centuries she would never see… perhaps there is something satisfyingly ghostly about a woman written out of history, haunting global culture through paper squares.
So today, in honour of her birthday, a small act of historical housekeeping. When you see those familiar images spread across a table like a theatrical cast awaiting direction, call them the Waite-Smith deck. It is not revisionism. It is proofreading.
the ICONIC Waite-Smith Cards