Pixie’s Theatre of Ghosts: The Rider–Waite–Smith as a Stage for the Spirits
#31DaysofHalloween
Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951) illustrator, designer, editor, and occult initiate, gave twentieth-century viewers a new way to read pictures when she visualized the seventy-eight images of the Rider–Waite–Smith (RWS) tarot in 1909. That deck did not spring from nowhere. It condensed a life lived between shores (Jamaica, New York, London, Cornwall), between disciplines (book art, theatre, small-press publishing), and between worldviews (Catholic devotion, folkloric story, ceremonial magic). Read across these thresholds, Smith emerges not as Waite’s “mere illustrator” but as a modern image-maker who democratized esoteric symbolism for public use (Greer, Untold Story 196–215; Decker and Dummett 100–07).
Born in London to American parents, Smith spent formative years in Kingston, Jamaica, absorbing West Indian folktales, festival pageantry, and song; materials she later refracted as ballad-like graphics and “speaking pictures” (Greer, Women of the Golden Dawn 255–60; Kaplan, Encyclopedia of Tarot, vol. 3, 493–95). In Brooklyn (1893–97) she studied at Pratt Institute under Arthur Wesley Dow, whose compositional pedagogy (line–mass–notan) privileged pattern, silhouette, and unity over academic finish; training directly visible in her quick, legible style (Greer, Untold Story 40–45). By the late 1890s she was publishing illustrations in New York and then resettled in London (1899), moving in Anglo-Irish literary circles and launching her hand-printed magazine The Green Sheaf (1903–04), a crucible for her occult-tinged vignettes and folk ballads (Greer, Untold Story 132–47; British Library). The transatlantic weave (Caribbean story-sense, Dow’s design grammar, London’s small-press bohemia) produced the concise theatricality that would later power the tarot scenes.
In 1901 Smith joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in London during the post-schism years, aligning with the Isis-Urania temple under A. E. Waite (Greer, Women 277–89; Decker and Dummett 78–84). While Smith and Aleister Crowley occupied different (often opposed) factions, their parallel involvement marks the visual culture around the Order; Smith’s art absorbed Qabalistic, elemental, and planetary correspondences as compositional scaffolding, not as didactic diagrams (Decker, Depaulis, and Dummett 207–12; Greer, Untold Story 164–77). Her eclecticism, Catholic sensibility plus ritual “maps” and a folkloric ear, generated a mystical pragmatism that would let complex systems read at a glance (Greer, Women 292–95).
Commissioned by Waite and issued by William Rider & Son (1909), the tarot was produced quickly; Waite’s preface notes a condensed timeline and his doctrinal aims for the trumps (Waite vii–viii). Yet historians concur that Smith exercised broad creative autonomy, especially in the Minor Arcana, which she rendered as small narrative scenes rather than traditional “pip” arrays (Greer, Untold Story 196–215; Decker and Dummett 100–07; Kaplan, Encyclopedia, vol. 1, 143–47). A key art-historical hinge is the quattrocento Sola-Busca deck (c. 1491), high-quality photographs circulated in London by 1907, and several of Smith’s minors echo those engravings (famously Ten of Wands), not as copying but as strategic deviation; a re-composition into a modern, theatrical register (Decker and Dummett 91–95). Smith thus turned elite antiquarian material into a publicly legible picture-language.
Smith’s breakthrough was to fully illustrate the pips. Where Marseille-type decks present numbered emblems, Smith stages micro-dramas on shallow sets, a bereft figure before toppled cups; a craftsman at a bench; a courier mid-stride, providing narrative hooks for intuitive reading (Waite 189–315; Kaplan, Encyclopedia, vol. 1, 146–47). Her color grammar adapts Golden Dawn scales to Rider’s inks, yellows for consciousness, blues for intuition, reds for will, tempered for legibility in small formats (Greer, Untold Story 210–12). Architectural motifs (arches, thresholds, towers) supply a navigable geography for suits, while patterned textiles and sky bands (sunbursts, moons, yods) cue elemental and planetary registers without requiring textual exegesis. The result is intuitive semiotics; immediate entry for novices, layered depth for the studious.
Compared with Marseille or Etteilla traditions, where pips are counting devices, Smith narrativizes the minors, converting the whole deck into a unified visual system whose coherence survives small cards, cheap paper, and later recolorings (Decker, Depaulis, and Dummett 147–59; Kaplan, Encyclopedia, vol. 1, 152–60). In design-history terms, she delivered a modernist solution; modular scenes that index complex ideas with economy of means, thereby democratizing occult symbolism for twentieth-century audiences (Greer, Untold Story 200–07).
Published as the “Rider–Waite” tarot, the deck omitted Smith’s name from the title page, and for decades discussion credited Waite’s system while collapsing the artwork into anonymity (Waite; Kaplan, Encyclopedia, vol. 1, 143). This gendered erasure reflected broader Edwardian credit politics; a woman executing a man’s esoteric text (Greer, Women 300–03). Recent scholarship and exhibition practice have reinscribed her authorship. The compendium Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story (2018) gathered correspondence, Green Sheaf plates, and preparatory work, while the Whitney Museum placed Smith among experimental American modernists in At the Dawn of a New Age (2022), normalizing her as a maker rather than a footnote (Greer, Untold Story 10–13; Whitney Museum of American Art). The correction is not special pleading but historical accuracy; the deck’s look is hers.
Well before 1909, Smith was an established book artist and stage designer. As author-illustrator she published Annancy Stories (1899), rendering Afro-Caribbean trickster tales with bold silhouettes and musical cadence (Greer, Untold Story 82–87). As editor-printer she issued The Green Sheaf (1903–04), a hand-press magazine uniting images, verse, and folk narrative (British Library). In the Lyceum orbit of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving, she produced designs and ephemera that honed her capacity to build symbolic space with theatrical economy (Greer, Women 265–77; Victoria and Albert Museum). These practices (ballad form, portable stagecraft, small-press pragmatism) directly inform the tarot’s shallow scenes and emblematic props.
Smith’s Catholic upbringing coexisted with Spiritualist and theosophical currents in Edwardian London (Greer, Women 292–99). Work with W. B. Yeats placed her within the Irish Literary Revival, where nationalism, folklore, and ritual performance merged (Yeats; Greer, Untold Story 118–23). The result is not propaganda but a devotional modernism: images staging thresholds (veils, doorways, dusk skies) where identities (spiritual, cultural, personal) are negotiated. Later, in Cornwall, she sustained Catholic practice and local craft economies while continuing to design, fusing sacrament and handmade art (Greer, Untold Story 284–90).
Because Smith’s scenes are intuitively readable, the RWS became the twentieth century’s default tarot, widely reissued (notably by U.S. Games from 1971) and quoted across film, graphic novels, album art, and the iconography of contemporary spirituality (Kaplan, Encyclopedia, vol. 1, 154–60). The deck’s modular imagery proved remediable in teaching decks, coloring books, and apps; in cultural terms, Smith authored a portable theatre of symbols whose scenes entered global visual literacy (Greer, Untold Story 206–12).
Restoration means more than appending a surname. It requires reading the tarot within Smith’s oeuvre, next to The Green Sheaf, theatre portfolios, and book plates, and tracing how Caribbean lore, Dow-school design, Golden Dawn “maps,” and Catholic ritual sensation meet in a single graphic intelligence. Archival syntheses (Greer; Kaplan; Decker, Depaulis, and Dummett) and institutional frames (Whitney; British Library; V&A) now support a standard art-historical claim: Smith solved a hard modern problem, how to visualize an esoteric system for public use, and in doing so altered both the practice of divination and the pedagogy of looking (Decker and Dummett 147–59; Whitney Museum of American Art).
Pamela Colman Smith stood where images cross from private doctrine to public sign. The RWS deck, made quickly on commercial paper with a theatre designer’s economy, did not simplify symbolism so much as stage it for readers. That outcome was the sum of a life between islands and capitals, churches and lodges, studios and stage wings. To restore Smith’s place is to see that modernism was built not only by manifestos and oils but also by tools for seeing; magazines, props, and, in this case, seventy-eight portable theatres of the soul. The system may be Waite’s in outline; the language is Smith’s (Waite vii–viii; Greer, Untold Story 196–215).
The Rider–Waite–Smith tarot has traveled far beyond Edwardian occultism, becoming not only the world’s most recognized tarot but also a living tool across spiritual traditions. To explore its significance through a Hoodoo lens, I spoke with my close friend
, an internationally known Hoodoo Spiritualist, Psychic Medium, Paranormal Consultant and Investigator, Spiritual Life Coach and Advisor, Natural Health Coach, and Teacher of Folk Magic. Ordained with the Universal Life Church since 2001 and certified as a Natural Health Coach through Phi Wellness Academy since 2020, Rev. Payshence has over thirty years of experience working as a Psychic Medium in both personal and paranormal contexts.In this conversation, she reflects on the Rider–Waite–Smith deck not as an abstract symbol system but as a spirit-active tool; charged in practice, grounded in conjure traditions, and lived through her decades of experience.
From a Hoodoo lens, what made the Rider–Waite–Smith deck the right tool and which cards feel most "charged" or spirit-active in conjure contexts?
The Rider–Waite–Smith deck was one of the only few options available to us besides playing cards for readings. To me, all of them feel spirit-charged, though some resonate more than others depending on the specific reading.
In session, how do you distinguish spirit communication (mediumship) from card-based symbolism, and how do you signal the difference in real time?
I use clairaudience. I may be looking at a card and then hear either a voice or a song associated with it, that becomes part of the reading in that moment.
What opening and closing protocols (prayers, psalms, protections, offerings) do you use so the work honors Hoodoo practice and keeps both of you spiritually clean?
Hoodoo practices vary from family to family and state to state, especially in the Southern United States. Personally, I knock on my cards and ask the client’s Ancestors and Guides to come through with the message they need to receive. For closing protocols, I usually thank the Spirits and give offerings later in gratitude for their help.
For hauntings or active sites, do you ever employ the Rider–Waite–Smith during investigation? If yes, which spread or card signatures help you identify presence, cause, and safe next steps?
During paranormal consultations, I use my pendulum rather than tarot cards.
What printing of the Rider–Waite–Smith deck do you prefer (Centennial, Pam-A/B restorations, modern reprints), and does palette/cardstock materially affect your read?
I prefer the Centennial edition. The palette and cardstock material don’t affect my readings.
When the cards and mediumship impressions diverge, how do you reconcile them, and what takes precedence in your practice?
I’ve never had that problem because I’ve always mixed the two practices. I like to use the cards as a buffer so I don’t have to dive too deeply during certain readings.
What evidence do you aim for in mediumship (names, details, verifiable “hits”) before offering guidance or prescriptions for spiritual work?
I offer whatever I hear or see first.
For clients new to conjure: how do you teach respectful practice (ancestral permissions, materials, saints/spirits) and set boundaries to avoid appropriation or unsafe work?
I teach Universal Folk Magic that anyone can use; practices found all around the world, just expressed in different languages. That way there’s no appropriation of cultures.
If difficult messages arise (crossed conditions, grief, spiritual attack), how do you frame them with agency, and what kinds of cleansings, prayers, or altar work do you typically recommend first?
I always do a reading first on the client’s situation. Then, depending on how serious it is, I usually recommend a cleansing spiritual bath and a cleansing of their home or living space.
Aftercare: what should people do in the 24–72 hours following a reading (journaling, baths, offerings, psalms, check-ins) to integrate the session and maintain protection?
I tell them to follow through according to their own spiritual or religious beliefs and practices.
🔮Step into the circle with Rev. Payshence Carr....where spirit, conjure, and the unseen come alive….🔮
Indigo Psychics:
References:
British Library. The Green Sheaf (1903–1904). Catalogue and holdings.
Decker, Ronald, and Michael Dummett. A History of the Occult Tarot, 1870–1970. Duckworth, 2002.
Decker, Ronald, Thierry Depaulis, and Michael Dummett. A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot. St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
Greer, Mary K., et al. Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story. U.S. Games Systems, 2018.
Greer, Mary K. Women of the Golden Dawn: Rebels and Priestesses. Park Street Press, 1995.
Kaplan, Stuart R. The Encyclopedia of Tarot. Vol. 1, U.S. Games Systems, 1978.
The Encyclopedia of Tarot. Vol. 3, U.S. Games Systems, 1990.
Smith, Pamela Colman. Annancy Stories. A. M. Philpot (Duckworth), 1899.
Victoria and Albert Museum. Theatre and Performance Collections: Designs and Ephemera Related to Pamela Colman Smith and the Lyceum Circle. Collection records.
Waite, Arthur Edward. The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. William Rider & Son, 1910.
Whitney Museum of American Art. At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism. Exhibition materials, 2022.
Yeats, W. B. Plays for an Irish Theatre. A. H. Bullen, 1911.
 | A guest post by
|
Fascinating, and such wonderful work!
Terrific piece! Great compliment to further the October celebrations ahead and run in tandem to my Art of Tarot history series. Exciting to incorporate dual authorship with a relevant interview. Looking forward to the next 🖤