The Tarot

There are lots of different styles of Tarot Deck, although the art that most people are familiar with comes from a very specific deck: the Rider-Waite deck — a deck that has proven enduringly popular for cartomancy¹, on account of that being what the deck was designed for.

You would think that the Rider-Waite deck was authored by someone named Rider and someone named Waite, and you would be wrong: the artist behind this popular deck was named Pamela Smith, but because she was a woman it was decided to leave her out of the history in favor of naming the deck after the company that published it (Rider) and the man who shouted instructions at Pamela Smith (A. E. Waite)².

Before its use as a divination tool, Tarot decks were just another kind of playing card deck, for a bunch of trick-taking games that have a lot in common with Bridge. Early Tarot decks featured things that make playing card decks useful for games, like “large, easy to read numbers”, “consistent iconography”, and “a form factor that is convenient for regular-sized human hands”. Instead of these things, the Rider-Waite Tarot has large, visually complex cards carrying a lot of symbol and allegory, allowing them to be interpreted in loads of different ways.

These complex visuals are packed to the gills with a potent combination of Jewish mysticism, astrology, Christian symbolism, and miscellaneous occult mumbo jumbo. The idea is similar to that of a Humble Bundle, in that if you mix enough garbage together into one package it starts to look profound and appealing. Nobody understands why people can be manipulated in this way, but here we are.

One of the greatest things about the Rider-Waite deck is that it is in the public domain. That’s right: you’re free to do pretty much whatever you want with these cards³.