100witches:88- Pamela Colman Smith (February 16th, 1878- September 18th, 1951)If you’ve purcha
100witches:88- Pamela Colman Smith (February 16th, 1878- September 18th, 1951)If you’ve purchased a tarot deck in the last hundred years, or are a Led Zeppelin fan, you’re familiar with her legacy.Smith’s story is hard to piece together. She was an artist and occultist who traveled between Brooklyn, London, and Jamaica. She attended Pratt at the age of 15, where she studied painting and printmaking, and became an established illustrator. After moving back to England, she traveled with a theater group, illustrated books for Bram Stoker and the Yeats brothers, and wrote/illustrated books on Jamaican folklore.After meeting occultist William Butler Yeats, he introduced Smith to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society which studied metaphysics. She joined in 1901, and it is here she first met the famous Arthur Edward Waite. In 1909, Waite commissioned Pamela for a 78 card tarot deck, a move that would both solidify and erase her legacy. The deck was published by William Rider & Son, and has become the word’s most popular set of tarot cards. U.S. Games purchased the rights to publish the deck in 1971. Her name was forgotten, and the deck was published as The Rider Tarot (sometimes Rider-Waite, or just Waite) but rarely includes Smith. When her name is included, she’s last (Waite-Smith, Rider-Waite-Smith, or just shortened to RWS). This has become the definitive tarot deck, against which most future decks are based. The importance of her contribution cannot go undervalued. Dozens of tarot decks have since been published, with artists basing their cards off of Pamela’s original designs. While Waite is given the credit for establishing the deck, it was really more of a design team. Waite suggested the latent symbolism, meaning, and structure, but Pamela brought each card to life. He gave her more detailed instructions for the Major Arcana, but it was Pamela that elaborated her vision for the Minor Arcana. Tarot decks prior to the RWS had simple, boring lesser suit cards, and it is Smith’s legacy of a detailed Minor Arcana that has yielded such lasting power from the RWS. Pamela made close to nothing for her work and died penniless. She is described as living alone, but recent studies have theorized she was a lesbian and lived with another woman. Her race is debated, although recent scholarship has shown she was most likely black or biracial. It is in this way she represents an unfortunately long tradition of women of color being marginalized within the occult and witch community. A woman whose legacy should be remembered and celebrated, has been reduced to a cheap insert biography card within the deck she created.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Colman_Smithhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarothttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rider-Waite_tarot_deckhttps://en.wikipedia.org/…/Hermetic_Order_of_the_Golden_Dawnhttps://medium.com/…/pamela-colman-smith-and-the-erasure-of…https://www.shondaland.com/…/demystifying-pamela-colman-sm…/ -- source link
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