The Original Rider Waite Tarot Deck – Waite & Colman-Smith

The original and only authorised edition of the famous 78-card Tarot deck designed by Pamela Colman Smith under the direction of Arthur Edward Waite.

Pack information: 78 cards with a very tiny booklet with very little information in.

Card dimensions: Original Rider Waite tarot cards are 70 x 120 mm

Authors: A. E. Waite & Pamela Colman Smith Arthur Edward Waite (1857-1942) was a leading scholar of the occult who produced the Rider Waite deck in 1910 in collaboration with artist Pamela Colman Smith. It has been the best selling Tarot deck of the twentieth century. Each card is rich in symbolism and clear in its design. It doesn’t have the more modern appeal of some recently published decks, but there are many subtleties in these paintings, which means that years after starting to use this deck you will be noticing new details. Many Tarot books use the Rider Waite deck for their illustrations.

A great tarot deck for beginners and for advanced.

A E Waite – also known as Arthur Edward Waite – was the designer and co-creator of the now famous Rider Waite Tarot deck. The classic Rider Waite Tarot was the first tarot deck to fully illustrate all 78 cards, with detailed pictures on the minor arcana cards. The cards were commissioned by Waite and drawn by Pamela Colman-Smith, one of his contemporaries.

Waite was born in 1857 in the US, but was brought up from a young age in Britain, after his father died. Waite joined the Hemetic Order of the Golden Dawn, became a Freemason in 1901 and entered the Societas Rosicruciana in 1902.

His strong interest in all esoteric matters, such as divination, magic, Kabbalism, alchemy and Freemasony, led to him penning a number of books. These include the Key to the Tarot, The Book of Ceremonial Magic and A New Encyclopedia of Freemasony.

Tarot Cards

The Tarot is a specific system that has 78 cards in total. There are 4 suits (referred to as the minor arcana) and 22 other cards (referred to as the major arcana). Each card represents a specific energy. And each card, through the picture on the card, is trying to help you to feel the specific energy of that card. The reason there are so many different kinds of Tarot decks is that Different Tarot decks may present this energy in different pictorial form. We have lots of articles on Tarot.