Llewellyn's Complete Book of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot

by Sasha Graham

  British Museum, London, 1909

  The woman lurks like a minotaur in a labyrinth. She inhabits a maze of bookshelves before an exhibition of cards. The satisfying scratch of graphite moving across creamy white paper fills her ears. Form and gesture flow through her and onto the sketchbook. She allows the images, cards, and photographs to pass through her consciousness like gossamer ghosts through walls. Librarians flicker around her like shadowy angels, scanning, referencing, organizing. The shelves, heavy with medieval tomes, grimoires, and celestial astrology, surround her diminutive figure. She pays no mind to the intimidating stacks or the overbearing language stuffed inside the ancient books. Her name is Pamela Colman Smith, but to her wide circle of friends and acquaintances she is Pixie.

  The name Pixie was bestowed upon Pamela’s head like a glittering tiara by England’s most celebrated actress, Ellen Terry, the Judi Dench of her day. The name Pixie is selected because it aligns with Pamela’s fairy qualities. Fairies inhabit unknown and magical realms, as does Pamela. One might say Pixie Pamela was born into unknown landscapes, where she thrives to this very day. Journalist Irwin MacDonald describes Pamela’s gifts in an article about her artwork:

  We all share the hidden life, but only the few have the power to express it or make it visible. Great poets, artists and musicians have it, and children are so close to it that they try sometimes to make the grown folk see and understand what is so real to them. But they have not the power…(Pamela’s) pictures are wholly symbolic, not in the conventional sense, but as the natural expression of one who puts thought and feeling into symbolic forms rather than into tones or words.1

  Pamela had a supernatural knack for making the unseen seen and the unknown malleable. Like a free-formed sprite, she traveled extensively in her formative years. “She took her first sea voyage when she was three months old, and since then has crossed the ocean twenty-five times”2 claims an article about Pamela written when she was only twenty-two years old.

  Pamela the Pixie lives with a foot in each world, both in a literal and a figurative sense. She was born in London to American parents and raised in parallel universes. Half of her childhood was spent on the sensual, balmy Caribbean island of Jamaica and the other half in clamoring, clattering Brooklyn, New York. Kingston, Jamaica, provided long, languid, colorful days. Tangerine sunrises in violet-blue waters and a local community of spiritual folk magic saturated her impressionable mind. Pamela’s caretaker came in the form of a beloved, devoted nanny who nurtured Pamela with maternal love, storytelling and island mythology: “Everywhere since her babyhood days, a quaint old Negro mammy has accompanied her.”3 Pamela devoured tales of island peoples, wild creatures, and folklore. Her art and tarot are saturated with the mountains and oceans of the Jamaican landscape. MacDonald describes how Pamela’s childhood affected her art while describing her published collection of Jamaican fairy tales:

  She listened to many tales and legends of the unseen world, told by witch-like old women in the firelight,—because in Jamaica no one dares to speak of such things in the broad light of day,—and she made a collection of them…4

  Brooklyn offered intellectual stimulation in opposition to languid island life. Pamela learned to funnel her imagination out of her mind’s eye and onto the canvas at Pratt Institute’s school of art as a teenager. Her roommate describes her to the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper: “Pamela liked to sleep until noon and then design and draw under artificial light.”5 Pamela dresses as electrically as she paints. She was known to wear “bizarre and barbaric colors.”6 The colors she wore matched the jars of pigment and paint in her art studio.

  Pamela left the Pratt Institute and found employment at London’s famous Lyceum Theater. Author Bram Stoker was the Lyceum’s business manager. Pamela’s father arranged a meeting between Pamela and the towering six foot two Dracula author. Stoker was immediately charmed by Pamela and her obvious talent. He hired her. Pamela joined the Lyceum, traveling with them on an American tour. She worked as a background player, painting stage sets and designing programs and stage costumes. Pamela’s father died during the tour, and Pamela returned to England with the theater company, who would become like an adoptive family.

  Pamela and Stoker shared a close relationship. Bram Stoker, in addition to his business duties, wrote and created lusciously detailed Lyceum programs sold to patrons and attendees of the theater. Theatrical programs, called “Souvaneers” in 1900, were an excellent secondary source of revenue for the theater, just as they are today. Broadway shows and concerts often erect stands selling merchandise, T-shirts, and programs of the show. The same was true for the Lyceum. Photography was an expensive young art form and complicated to print. Artistic illustrations peppered the program pages with scenes from the plays, intimate moments between actors and full-color costume representations. Pamela filled the programs with vibrant play illustrations and portraits of the charismatic actors who performed at the Lyceum. Bram Stoker wrote the text. The two collaborated long after Pamela left the Lyceum, when Stoker hired Pamela to illustrate his book Lair of the White Worm, which had its cinematic adaptation in 1988.

  Stoker, godfather of vampire literature, published Dracula in 1897, two years before meeting Pamela. Dracula was well received by critics, but neither it nor its author would become iconic until the novel was adapted into film versions later in the century. Bram Stoker never lived to see the success of his book or realize his fame. Ironically, the sketches Pamela currently works on will follow in Dracula’s fate. She has been commissioned to create a tarot deck. Her deck’s illustrations, like Dracula, will sell millions upon million of copies. It will become the gold standard to which thousands of new tarot decks will pattern themselves. Pamela will never know this.

  Pamela pauses her sketching to rearrange her shaft of silken skirts of deep cerulean fabric folding over her short legs. Twenty-three original engravings and fifty-five photographs are spread before her. Suns, moons, stars, and odd figures fill the Italian cards. It is the Sola Busca tarot deck. She’s come for inspiration for the deck she is crafting for her colleague Arthur Waite. They have decided to create something unique and extra special in their cards. Usually a tarot deck only illustrates the major arcana, but Pamela is going to illustrate every single card. She’s come to see the Sola Busca deck, the only other deck to illustrate the minors, for ideas. She is delighted to see it on display at the British Museum.

  Her eyes flash across a figure bent over an armful of swords. Her work is made quick, flipping her sketchbook as impression after impression is made. She snaps the sketchbook shut, secures it inside a brown leather case, and makes her way out to the rotunda. Pixie Pamela moves through a golden beam of sunlight streaming through the oculus eye in the ceiling of the British Museum’s reading room. The vast treasury of holdings inside the British Museum is open only by special request to guests. Library card holders including Virginia Woolf, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. G. Wells are a few who are granted access. She’s glad to have finished enough sketches to complete the deck. She moves with urgency, a look of satisfaction across her intense face. Existing photographs reveal Pamela’s physical features to be unique. Her face carries a shapeshifting quality, remaining true to her fairy calling. It is near impossible to identify her cultural heritage. Born to American parents in London, she looks to be of Asian and African descent. She is childlike and womanly, vulnerable yet closed. Letters reveal she is quick to anger. Her poetry reveals a stunning vulnerability. Her opinions of art and love for theater remained strong and true till the end of her life, as evidenced in articles she wrote about stage design, production, and creativity.

  London’s clash and clamor greets her ears as she exits the museum. She makes her way past the clip-clopping of horses pulling Victoria carriages to London’s Chelsea district, her home. Night falls quickly as she clinks the gate behind her. English rose and cindery smoke fill the air as she enters her chambers. She strikes a match, and lamplight f
lickers across her forest-green walls. Her eyes twinkle like a mischievous fairy as she moves through her chambers. It looks more like a curiosity shop than an apartment. Brass candlesticks glimmer from a grand piano. Heavy crystal ashtrays spill over with the remnants of last night’s guests. Loose leaf music sheets are scattered like leaves on the floor. Miniature china toys line the shelves. Heavy artifacts, books, and portfolios act like weights holding down pieces of her room, as if to keep reality from slipping away.

  She moves through the parlor and into her studio in the back, where she tosses her leather case and sketchbook. Dozens of bottled inks hold the fanatical colors she employs on her illustrations. Gardner Tell describes her workspace:

  If you should enjoy the great privilege of a peep into her studio—a great room joyously free from the commonplaces that have come to make one studio generally representative of every other one, a room where art is living rather than imprisoned—you will see over in a corner by the window a little table quite quivering with curious bottles, saucers of pigment, vivid inks, Chinese whites, blacks, and indigoes, while one little corner of it is a veritable chemical emporium. Before this material panegyric of paint the clever artist sits, and dipping a Japanese brush in this place or that, fixes her inimitable creations deftly and definitely and without affectation or pottering.7

  Her growing artistic reputation is built not only on her unique vision but on her vibrant choices of color. Her studio is as eccentric and varied as her talents. She holds the esteem of being the first non-photographic artist to exhibit at Arthur Stieglitz’s Photo Secession Gallery in New York. Stieglitz, a famed photographer in his own right, introduces Europe’s avant-garde artists to the New York City art scene. Pamela will soon pen a letter to Stieglitz saying, “I’ve just finished a big job for very little cash,” referring to her tarot deck.8

  For someone as young as Pamela to show at the Stieglitz gallery is a coup d’état. Pamela enjoys a second show at the Photo Secession gallery and includes illustrations from the tarot deck she is currently working on. Stieglitz’s wife and muse is American painter Georgia O’Keeffe, renowned for her lush feminist Southwestern paintings. Decades from this moment, O’Keeffe will posthumously donate remaining unsold Pamela paintings to Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Tell describes Pamela’s talent and use of vibrant color:

  The colored drawings cannot be appreciated through the interpretation of black and white, and their exquisite brilliancy, reached a manner that would startle any plodding artist or technician, can scarcely be described by words.9

  Tell is on point with his description. One can’t believe the worlds Pamela unleashes though her work until you are looking with your own eyes at the colors and shapes she creates. The RWS deck is a mere suggestion of Pamela’s talent.

  Pamela throws her doors open on various evenings to host bohemian house parties. Artists, poets, and writers typical of the day attend in droves. She carries a special fondness for actors due to her formative years working for the Lyceum Theater. Pamela engages in deep friendships with renowned artists through the years. In addition to her friendship and working relationship with Bram Stoker, she was a close confidant and friend of William Butler Yeats. Yeats introduced Pamela to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. She was symbolically adopted by actress Ellen Terry after her father passed. Ellen Terry was one of the most famous actresses in England; imagine Meryl Streep taking you under her wing. Pamela and Edith Craig, Ellen’s daughter, were like sisters.

  She traveled with Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, playing small parts and having the greatest time ever, when she was in her middle teens, and for years lived with Ellen Terry and her daughter, Edith Craig. You can imagine what years they were—busy years of painting and sketching, designing stage costumes, illustrating pirate songs, writing and telling fairy-stories, doing countless interesting things, and doing them all amazing well!10

  Pamela dresses in colorful costumes and performs her Jamaican folktales for party guests. The Brooklyn Eagle describes her as “a whimsical tale teller” who “has all of London on their feet.” She turns her storytelling talent into a paying profession and is hired out as party entertainment. Pamela makes an appearance at Mark Twain’s New Year’s Eve party and a journalist describes her as “an exotic young woman with melting dark eyes and a sweet crooning voice.”11 She was so charming, the journalist states that he “and all his (Mark Twain’s) distinguished company of guests forgot time, space and the everyday world of commonplace reality.”12 Pamela places her rich experience of Jamaica into her folk stories. She even uses her voice:

  In the weird dialect of the Jamaican Negroes—a sort of cockney English with Spanish coloring, a rhythmic rising inflection at the end of each sentence that must have come directly from the voodoo worshipers of the African jungle—she told fairy folk tales…13

  Pamela’s theatrical presentations do not end with her presentation of folk tales. She additionally

  varies her unique programs of entertainment by singing old English ballads and songs in a sixteenth-century costume, also by “lilting” such modern Irish poets as W. B. Yeats’ “Dream of the Wandering Angus” in the manner of ye ancient bards and troubadours.14

  Pamela devotes herself, above all, to story. To her story, she will be true.

  I tell the same stories to the Russian, Jewish and Italian children at the east side settlement schools that I do in the literary salons and at the National Arts Club, and they seem to go equally well though the comments are different.15

  Pamela employs methods expressing her narrative differently depending on her audience:

  When I tell the Jamaica stories to very young children I illustrate them with dolls, which I make myself—saw them out of wood with a fret-saw, then paint them and stick on feathers and beads, Jamaica mammy style. These are to little kiddies what book illustrations are to grown-ups. But the real, universal world-old way is to tell the stories orally, and put the illustrations in as you go along, by sign language, facial expression, gesture and all that sort of thing.16

  Pamela’s theatrical passion, work, and knowledge held immense value when she designed the tarot deck. Each card appears like a scene on a stage. The reader is free to project themselves onto the cards like the audience in a play or film. Pamela creates a mysterious series of cards inside her deck. Waite never mentions these thirteen cards; however, I call them “stage cards.” Stage cards are examined in detail on page 370. They appear to be derived from Pamela’s toy theater.

  The toy theater concept was introduced in England circa 1810. Pamela created a miniature and portable theater at her home in London. Her miniature theater is a lifelong passion; as the Brooklyn Eagle reports, “One of the earliest stories that is told of her is the pastime of her childhood of making little theaters, of writing plays and of managing puppets.”17 The catalogue of the posthumous Pamela Colman Smith show “To All Believers” expresses the direct result the toy theater had on the RWS deck: “The simplified renderings of her figures, the dark outlines, and the bright colors were all reminiscent of the theatrical sheets. The oriental character of many of her drawings must have been fostered in part by her enthusiasm for miniature dramas as well as Dow’s emphasis on Japanese art.” The theatrical sheets with their “wild forests, frowning fortresses, extravagant castles, mountain torrents, haunted glens, and picturesque huts” probably also influenced the choice of landscape elements she later incorporated into her paintings and tarot card designs.

  All the scenery and decorations in the theater were created by Pamela. Inside her toy theater she performed ballads of forgotten lore. A writer for Brush and Pencil states

  I have never seen a more gorgeous presentation on any stage. The knights and ladies of the buskin are first drawn on stiff paper and colored, then cut and made to lead upright lives with a bit of glue and proper manipulation. Oh, that some of our modern playwrights might come here f
or a lesson in dramatic construction or that the scenic artists of to-day did not feel that they could not learn a thing or two! Here a professional stage costumer might well gasp envious; and you should see the procession of over three hundred figures called forth…It is marvelous, and when you come away you feel that art is a tangible thing after all, tangible because it had been brought before you in an enjoyable way; and in the sanctity of your own chamber when you look over your possession of some of Pamela Colman Smith’s prints…you will feel that you have something beautiful and enjoyable; therefore something which must be art.18

  Compare the RWS images to this description; what she created for her miniature theater and her tarot deck are practically interchangeable.

  Pamela is described by critics as having synesthesia. The modern definition of synesthesia, the root of which means “joined condition,” is when a single sensory condition is perceived by a second sense. Synesthesiatics possess senses that cross in a number of ways. Colors provoke a taste. For example, the color blue tastes like cotton candy. Smells induce sound; for instance, the scent of apple pie evokes a Vivaldi concerto. The crossing of senses occurs every time the color is seen or the flavor is smelled. It happens involuntarily. It is believed that human babies contain completely connected senses. As babies mature, the senses separate. Sight becomes clear, taste becomes distinct, and tactile touch is developed. However, individuals with synesthesia maintain some crossover connections.

  She is described by Melinda Boyd Parson as having synesthesia, yet Pamela’s synesthesia is a technique employed for painting, not an inborn crossing of the senses. Pamela uses music to open visions within her. She paints these visions. This is different than the medical definition of synesthesia. Pamela uses it as a modern art technique.