Rider-Waite Deck

Rider-Waite Deck Overview

The Rider-Waite deck is an extremely popular deck. It is often referred to as the Rider deck. Originally published by the Rider Company in 1910, the images were drawn by artist Pamela Colman Smith, to the instructions of Christian mystic and occultist Arthur Edward Waite.

• The deck is a simple, user-friendly one.
• Its imagery, especially within the Major Arcana, is complex and replete with occult inner-symbolism.
• The subjects of the Major Arcana are based on those of the very earliest decks, but have been significantly modified to reflect Waite and Smith's view of Tarot.
• An important difference from Marseilles style decks is that Smith drew scenes on the numeric cards to depict divinatory meanings.
• The divinatory meanings derive, in great part, from traditional cartomantic divinatory meanings arrived at by Etteilla and others, and from divinatory meanings first espoused by The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. (Both Waite and Smith were members of this order).
• The Rider-Waite isn't the first deck to include completely illustrated numeric cards. The first was the 15th-century Sola-Busca deck. However, in this case of this deck, the illustrations were not made to facilitate divination.

"Click" on any Rider-Waite card below to see a larger pictorial version.

Major Arcana
Minor Arcana
Wands
Cups
Swords
Pentacles

• Major Arcana
  
  This is the Rider-Waite Deck's Major Arcana page. It provides thumbnail illustrations of the individual Tarot cards, within the Major Arcana, that are "linked" to an information page for each card.
• Minor Arcana
  
  This is the Rider-Waite Deck's Minor Arcana page. It provides thumbnail illustrations of the individual Tarot cards, within the Minor Arcana, that are "linked" to an information page for each card.

Rider-Waite, Aquarian Tarot, Morgan-Greer Tarot, Ukiyoe, and Swiss 1JJ decks are copyrighted to and published by US Games Systems.

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