The Three Main Traditions

Marseille, Rider-Waite-Smith and Crowley's Thoth: the core framework of card meanings in nearly every tarot deck sold today still sits within the bounds these three traditions set.

The Marseille tradition: a standard pattern takes shape

Around the eighteenth century, tarot cards printed in and around Marseille in France gradually became the most widely influential standard version, known as the Tarot de Marseille. Note that "Marseille" is not the name of one specific deck. It is a collective name for a group of decks of similar style and date, produced by different printing workshops. Their suits (batons or wands, coins, swords, cups), the way the number cards are drawn, and the number and order of the major cards are highly consistent, but there is no single "original". The oldest surviving printed edition is believed to be kept in Paris. The Marseille number cards follow the style of medieval card games: they show only the right number of batons, cups, swords or coins, with no full scene. This is a clear difference from the way the minor cards were later drawn in the Waite deck. Every major card has a name and a Roman numeral, except The Fool, which is unnumbered; this laid the ground for The Fool later being treated as card 0. From then on the number, names and order of the major cards became more or less fixed, setting the standard for the tarot that followed. The Marseille tradition itself carries no occult correspondences such as astrology or the Kabbalah; those were a layer added later by the occult tradition ^uncertain. Whether the original artists deliberately worked ideas popular in the Renaissance, such as alchemy and Neoplatonism, into the major cards, or simply reflected the culture of their time without meaning to, is still unsettled among scholars. This is why the Marseille tarot is often seen as a bridge between two eras: looking back, it seems more like a pure game deck; looking forward, it lacks the later occult tarot's habit of tying every detail to a defined system ^uncertain.

The Rider-Waite-Smith system: the start of the modern mainstream

In 1909, A. E. Waite (Arthur Edward Waite), a member of the Golden Dawn, worked with the artist Pamela Colman Smith, also a Golden Dawn member, to publish the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot (RWS for short). The deck was drawn quickly, in just a few months. Waite put his main effort into the Major Arcana and left the Minor Arcana to Smith to develop freely around their themes. This is the direct reason the number cards ended up as full scenes, instead of rows of a few cups or swords, so that the minor cards could be read from their pictures the way the major cards are. Most modern tarot decks have followed this approach since, and it is the most widely used system today. This site's card pages use it as the default basis for their descriptions.

Waite was in a somewhat contradictory position when he designed the deck. He had left the Golden Dawn and promised not to reveal the order's inner esoteric knowledge, yet he wanted the deck to revive what he saw as the open, freely interpretable spirit of the "old tarot", instead of the Golden Dawn practice in which every card has a "standard answer". As a result, the astrological and Kabbalistic correspondences in the RWS images are deliberately played down and only partly kept. Someone who knows nothing of the system can read one layer of meaning directly from the pictures, and someone familiar with the Golden Dawn framework can read another, more hidden layer of correspondences; the two do not always agree ^inferred. The RWS deck was also one of the first tarot decks published with a companion guidebook (The Pictorial Key to the Tarot). The Golden Dawn's own Book T circulated for a long time only inside the order, so outsiders who got hold of the cards had no way to look up their meanings. Next to that, the RWS deck was much easier to pick up, which is a major reason it replaced the Golden Dawn tarot as the mainstream. The Pictorial Key to the Tarot is uneven, though. The Major Arcana section is fairly solid, but the text for the Minor Arcana often does not match the scenes Smith actually painted. That is one reason later readers have relied more and more on the images themselves, and less on Waite's original text, when reading the minor cards ^inferred.

The Crowley-Thoth system: a more occult direction

Aleister Crowley also came out of the Golden Dawn, and he was a member whom Mathers himself thought highly of and promoted. That personal connection was tangled up in the order's internal conflicts, and both Mathers and Crowley were eventually expelled. Around 1938, Crowley began designing the Thoth Tarot with the artist Lady Frieda Harris. The two spent five years trying to fold as many occult systems as possible into one deck: astrology, magic, alchemy, Egyptian mythology and even the I Ching. The paintings were finished in 1943 and the companion book, The Book of Thoth, came out in 1944, but because of printing limitations the first color edition of the deck itself did not appear until 1969. The Thoth system keeps the Golden Dawn's astrological and Kabbalistic framework built mainly on Mathers's theories, but it goes further than Waite toward system and toward the tradition of ceremonial magic. Some card names were also changed (Strength became Lust, Justice became Adjustment), and its numbering differs from the Waite deck in one key respect; see the note on the numbering of Strength and Justice in Correspondence Table.

The core differences at a glance

Modern developments

From the second half of the twentieth century to today, tarot has moved from a fairly niche occult tool toward a more mainstream aid to self-exploration and counseling. Writers such as Rachel Pollack and Mary K. Greer brought psychology, feminism, mindfulness and similar perspectives into tarot reading, and the more psychological "turned inward" approach to reversals (see Reading Reversals) is closely tied to this line of development ^inferred. Between Waite and Crowley there is also a group of figures who took a middle path, such as Paul Foster Case. His An Introduction to the Study of the Tarot (1920) and his later, fuller The Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the Ages (1947) both interpret the Major Arcana on the basis of the Golden Dawn's symbolism, trying to combine the rigor of the Golden Dawn with Waite's accessibility, though he has never been as well known as the Waite and Crowley schools. Case's relationship with Waite was also delicate. In his writings he stated openly that a good deal of Waite's The Pictorial Key to the Tarot was actually lifted from Mathers, and argued that Waite publicly distanced himself from the Golden Dawn while quietly continuing to use Mathers's theories. Mutual accusations of this kind, of disowning a source in public while borrowing from it in private, are common in tarot history [uncertain, Case's view alone]. Most tarot decks on the market today are still artistic redesigns built on the Rider-Waite-Smith images (often called "RWS clones": decks that keep the RWS structure and correspondences and only redraw the art), and their core framework of card meanings has not left the bounds set by these three traditions.

Related pages

• The Origins of Tarot
• How Tarot Became Occult
• Correspondence Table
• Reading Reversals
• The Court Cards
• The Major Arcana
• Justice
• Wheel of Fortune
• Strength
• Temperance
• The Lovers
• Death