Pamela Colman Smith

Yeah, and I love how you go into detail in your book and with visitations from many wonderful artists.

You have Pamela Coleman Smith and you have Federico Garcia Lorca and you have Guillermo del Toro.

So, you know, the film element.

Salvador Dali.

I know that future me is gonna love it, and maybe some other people will too.

Now, what about the Four of Pentacles reversed, which is the card in the middle? A lot of people don't really like the Four of Pentacles because Pamela Colman Smith's version looks kind of constipated.

[laughs] And for this reason, we tend to read him as being kind of a miser or a Scrooge type character holding onto his money for dear life.

But that's not all there is to this card.

In what ways am I innately connected to the universe? What is my gut telling me? Why will I or won't listen to it? And it's interesting, we get the High Priestess with the moon, the new moon in Virgo.

Because the High Priestess is just like in her power, you know, in the original Pamela Coleman Smith drawing, she just looks so all knowing and wise and kind.

There's a kindness and a a stillness.

There's a inner knowing about her.

they had

surfaced like twice to my knowledge um once was a collection of photographs of the cards were put on display in the british museum and pamela coleman smith saw them there and used some of the imagery to put into the smithwaite standard tarot deck.

Okay.

But apart from that, the cards have been virtually invisible.

Who's the artist who did the illustrations for the AE weight deck?

right right right yeah

yeah and yeah she's a really great artist too i guess there's just a pretty big book on her work put out mostly focusing on the tarot but also some of her like ad work and it's so crazy seeing that like absolutely iconic style like you can't really get much more like iconic than than the rider weight tarot totally and like seeing it used as like you know, for like ads, like in the twenties or something is crazy.

And I think, you know, there were some key reasons and key individuals who were responsible for Tarot becoming more democratized in that way.

So among them being Arthur Waite and Pamela Coleman Smith and that deck, the Rider-Waite-Smith deck.

So, you know, I sometimes do think it comes down to key individuals, you know, that if those individuals hadn't existed and they hadn't made that deck in the way that they did, that maybe Terra would never have had the sort of ubiquity that it does have today.

You know, it could have still remained a very niche thing.

But for the minor arcana, he said, you know, these really aren't important because they kind of hadn't been important up to that point.

So you can do whatever you want to do.

And so what Pamela Coleman Smith did was to create very detailed illustrations for each of those cards.

So as detailed, you could say, as the Major Arcana.

It was first published in 1909.

The deck was created by artist Pamela Coleman Smith under the direction of A.E. Waite.

Pamela Coleman Smith deserves more credit than she gets sometimes.

Her artwork gave the Minor Arcana something incredibly important.

Scenes, instead of having cards showing nothing but five cups or seven swords, Smith illustrated little stories within those cards.