What Is the Rider Waite Deck

The Waiter-Smith deck is a fine example of compelling tarot imagery. This is by far the most popular tarot deck in use today, and it is likely because of the care and attention of its creator, Arthur Edward Waite. Waite was a Victorian occult book editor who, after much reading on the subject, designed his own cards and published a book in 1910 titled, The Key to the Tarot. His religious or spiritual orientation is decidedly mystic, if not entirely obscure, but somehow, this works to heighten the fascination and mystery of the tarot.

Oddly enough, Waite did not intend his cards to be used for divination. In The Key to the Tarot, he writes: “It should be understood that I am not denying the possibility of divination, but I take exception, as a mystic, to the dedications which bring people into these paths as if they had any relation to the Mystic Quest.” Suffice it to say, Waite had a particular vision of the tarot, and a part of that vision was the graphic presentation of the arcane mystic symbolism of the “Secret Tradition”. To that end, he directed artist Pamela Coleman Smith in the execution of a series of paintings that served as the template for his cards, intended to visually convey “the profound meaning of the Major Arcana” and the “deep symbolic meanings” of the Minor Arcana.

The Waite-Smith cards are presented in the style of Victorian neo-classical art, but what truly sets this deck apart from all the others available to card readers today is the curious fact that there are images of people on every card. Other decks, for example, typically present the Minor Arcana in the manner of regular playing cards, showing only the suit signs or “pips,” but in the Waite-Smith deck, people are everywhere, portrayed in situations suggestive of the card’s meaning. Waite puts a human face to every card, and for this reason, his designs are especially suited to the “Synergy Tarot Method”. Of course, it is possible to learn Synergy Tarot using any of the many card designs available today, but in my discussion of the cards, I will be referring specifically to the designs of the Waite-Smith deck, which I find to be best suited for learning to read the tarot.

A puzzling feature of the tarot is that the complete deck of seventy-eight cards is made up of two distinct kinds of cards: the twenty-two Major Arcana, numbered zero to twenty-one and the fifty-six Minor Arcana, which are similar to standard playing cards. Grillot de Givry, a tarot scholar contemporary to Waite, observes, “The tarot is composed, in reality, of two different packs.” The two packs together are called “The Great Pack,” and learning to read the tarot starts with developing some skill in distinguishing the two kinds of cards. What follows is a description of both groups of cards with two practice exercises to help orient new card readers to the format of each.