Reviving a Forgotten Artist of the Occult...
The classic! With rich imagery, stunning colors, and an iconic place in the realm of divination, the Rider-Waite Tarot is perhaps the best known deck in the world. The Smith-Waite Tarot Deck is a faithful reproduction of the original deck created in 1909 featuring Pamela “Pixie” Colman Smith’s beloved artwork, created under the direction of Arthur E. Waite..
Pamela Colman Smith (Pixie) was a Renaissance woman, ahead of her time in many ways in varied roles of artist, occultist, poet, designer, suffragist, folklorist, editor, publisher, and miniature-theatre maker. Her mother was Jamaican, her father a white American. She was a folklorist who recited tales in a Jamaican dialect. As an artist, Pamela specialized in the art of synesthetic paintings that were based upon the visual images she saw in classical music. Throughout her life, Pamela was interested in mysticism and the occult. Her deep involvement with the Order of the Golden Dawn culminated in a commission from Arthur E. Waite to illustrate a tarot deck.
She completed all 78 illustrations in just a few months for a flat fee, a sum sadly in keeping with her historically unacknowledged contribution to the deck. Whilst Waite focused on the symbolism of the tarot’s Major Arcana, he left the illustration of the Minor Arcana to Pamela’s uninhibited imagination.
It's noteworthy that the figures in Pamela’s tarot are often gender-ambiguous, reflecting the trend for short hair and masculine clothing common amongst her female friends at the time. The representation of gender neutrality points towards Pamela’s future involvement with the pre-war suffragist movement, for which she designed propaganda posters as part of the artists’ collective Suffrage Atelier.
