Tarot Tradition and the Drowning World
By Thea Wirsching
With hundreds of new Tarot decks flooding the market today, novelty has come to trump tradition in the quest to make an impact in a saturated genre. To that end we now have niche decks based upon popular movies, TV shows, discrete historical periods, and a vast spectrum of fantasy worlds. Other decks aim for uniqueness by distancing themselves from the Tarot’s roots in graphic illustration, defying our visual expectations with abstract compositions, digital collage, or photographs staged to resemble the Tarot’s archetypal figures. Oracle decks completely dispense with the Tarot’s standard format of twenty-two major arcana cards and four suits, each with its own royal court, and concoct wholly new thematic schemas with which to divine the future. But the most commercially successful model for new tarots seems to adhere closely to the visual themes first laid out by artist Pamela Colman Smith in 1909, for what in time became the most popular and influential deck in the world, the Rider-Waite. Smith was paid very little for the legendary Tarot illustrations that memorialized the name of the deck’s first publisher instead of her own...
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