Framing Postcolonial Place: Towards an Irish Reading of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot
Résumés
Dans cet article Mathew Staunton réexamine les origines du tarot Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS) de 1909 et suggère que son illustratrice, Pamela Colman Smith, a intégré des paysages irlandais dans les images du jeu. À travers des recherches archivistiques et une analyse visuelle, l’article retrace les liens artistiques de Smith avec les cercles culturels irlandais, en particulier sa collaboration en 1902 avec Jack Butler Yeats sur A Broad Sheet, où tous deux ont célébré l’ouest de l’Irlande et contribué à façonner un langage visuel centré sur le paysage et l’identité nationale.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés :
Colman Smith (Pamela), cartes de tarot, Yeats (famille), paysage, identité nationale, cadres discursifsPlan
Haut de pageTexte intégral
Introduction
- 1 The dual purpose of this symposium was to revisit the history of play as a research method and theo (...)
- 2 Arthur Edward Waite (1857-1942) was an American-born British poet, mystic, and occult scholar. A me (...)
1This article originated as a paper delivered at the “Jouer / déjouer” symposium at the Musée français de la carte à jouer in Issy-les-Moulineaux in December 2024.1 It is a preliminary expansion upon the intuitive hypothesis (based on similarities between certain cards and the landscape features of counties Sligo and Mayo) that the influential 1909 divinatory tarot deck created by occultist Arthur Edward Waite2 and artist-illustrator Pamela Colman Smith reveals identifiable Irish influences in its artwork.
- 3 Joan Coldwell, “Pamela Colman Smith and the Yeats Family”, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, v (...)
- 4 Stuart R. Kaplan was the founder of US Games Systems, Inc., the US publisher of the Rider-Waite-Smi (...)
- 5 British magician Marcus Katz in particular has outlined this theory very succinctly on his YouTube (...)
2Happily, subsequent research appears to confirm the initial premise. Thanks to Joan Coldwell’s seminal 1977 article3 and the archival curation of Stuart R. Kaplan,4 we know that in the early 20th century, Smith was deeply integrated into overlapping artistic, literary, and esoteric circles in London. It was primarily through these groups and some Irish contacts in New York that she met and found work collaborating with Irish artists and writers such as Seumas MacManus, Lady Gregory, the Yeats family, Bram Stoker, and George Russell. Similarly, the project to illustrate the seventy-eight cards of what would come to be known as the “Rider-Waite-Smith” tarot emerged from her participation in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, of which Waite and William Butler Yeats were also active members. Aside from commentators who have highlighted one illustration of County Mayo for The Green Sheaf as the “secret” key to understanding the structure of the tarot,5 however, no study has yet explored in any depth the possibility that her Irish connections influenced her tarot designs.
- 6 The British Library and National Library of Ireland catalogues list Smith as a mere contributor rat (...)
- 7 Hilary Pyle, the biographer of Jack Butler Yeats, is consistently dismissive of Smith.
3Although Smith’s illustration work and her tarot designs are both firmly anchored in the field of printing history, they have generally been studied separately. Championed by Kaplan, her significance in Anglo-American and European esoteric discourses has been emphatically reiterated in recent years. By contrast, she has generally been overlooked or pushed into the background by literary scholars and cataloguers6 who often underestimate(d) the role of illustrators and colourists. Nevertheless, her name peeps unobtrusively out of letters, biographies and footnotes, and while her influence is rarely acknowledged with enthusiasm by those she influenced most (and their biographers7), knowledge of it persists and she has maintained a steady presence among art historians, book historians, and scholars of printed imagery, theatre and tarot lore.
4Coldwell and Kaplan have thoroughly documented Smith’s life and work in London during the 1900s, but revisiting key aspects, particularly her connections with Irish artists and authors, will be helpful here. For non-specialist readers, a clear introduction to the structure of divinatory tarot decks will be essential in framing my thesis in an accessible way. Once this groundwork is established, I will explore Smith’s artistic engagement with Irish landscapes and how these influences shaped her tarot card designs. In doing so, I will draw on David A. Snow’s concept of “framing processes” to examine how visual and symbolic elements are selectively emphasised to construct meaning – particularly in the context of national identity and cultural representation.
Background
- 8 Founded in 1887 by oil magnate and philanthropist Charles Pratt, the Pratt Institute provided pract (...)
- 9 In 1893, Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922) was appointed assistant curator of the Japanese collection a (...)
- 10 This is a genre of Japanese art that flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Hokusai and H (...)
- 11 Pierre-Louis Mathieu, La génération symboliste: 1870-1910, Geneva, Skira, 1990; Ukiyo-e Prints and (...)
- 12 “Als Ik Kan, Notes, Reviews”, The Craftsman, vol. 11, no. 6, March 1907, p. 770.
- 13 Yeats wrote: “I should feel safe getting her to illustrate anything” after meeting her to arrange a (...)
- 14 Elizabeth Foley O’Connor, “Pamela’s Life”, in Stuart R. Kaplan, Mary K. Greer, Elizabeth Foley O’Co (...)
5At the age of 15, Smith enrolled at the Pratt Institute8 in Brooklyn, New York, where she studied under the influential arts educator Arthur Wesley Dow,9 who also taught Georgia O’Keeffe. As a result, her work was deeply informed by fin-de-siècle Symbolism, the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement, and the bold, expressive lines of Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints.10 Across these influences, landscape emerges as a unifying thematic thread, while printmaking serves as an important means of artistic expression.11 Smith developed a successful illustration and printmaking practice while still at school and was recognised by James McNeill Whistler12 and John Butler Yeats13 for her raw intuitive talent. She also earned the respect of Alfred Stieglitz who offered her a solo exhibition in his New York gallery in 1907.14
- 15 Their paths likely crossed through publishing networks or mutual acquaintances in the folklore and (...)
- 16 Seumas MacManus, In Chimney Corners: Merry Tales of Irish Folk Lore, illustrated by Pamela Colman S (...)
- 17 Elizabeth Foley O’Connor, “Pamela’s Life”, p. 30-32.
- 18 Her itinerary has, unfortunately, not been recorded. She may have travelled via Enniskillen / Strab (...)
- 19 Joan Coldwell, “Pamela Colman Smith and the Yeats Family”, p. 30.
6She came to attention of Donegal writer-storyteller Seumas MacManus who was in New York in 1898-189915 and accepted a commission to illustrate his In Chimney Corners: Merry Tales of Irish Folk Lore.16 This led to her visiting MacManus’s home in the coastal village of Mountcharles in Donegal17 in 1899. The trip was significant in that it was one of the very few occasions Smith had to experience the Irish countryside and Atlantic coastline firsthand,18 rather than through photographs or the work of her Irish collaborators in London. She would later visit Dublin with William Butler Yeats and meet Lady Gregory in the autumn of 1901.19
- 20 There has been speculation that Stoker was a member of the Golden Dawn but there is as yet no proof
- 21 Elizabeth Foley O’Connor, “Pamela’s Life”, p. 40.
- 22 Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats: A Biography, London, Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1970, p. 67.
- 23 Elizabeth Foley O’Connor, “Pamela’s Life”, p. 42.
- 24 This capacity for empathy is evident in her intuitive grasp of her collaborators’ artistic intentio (...)
- 25 Ellen Terry described her as “extraordinarily industrious and ever-lastingly making & selling as fa (...)
7When her father died in December 1899, she returned to England with her friends and collaborators Bram Stoker,20 Henry Irving, and Ellen Terry.21 Hilary Pyle gives an almost fictional account of Smith at this time as an impressionable young girl passively absorbing the ideas of the more established artist Jack Butler Yeats,22 but, in reality, she returned to London a well-trained, respected and already successful artist-illustrator-designer. Very quickly, her South Kensington studio became a weekly meeting place for artists, writers, and actors.23 This circle expanded when she joined the Irish Literary Society, the avant-garde theatre group the Masquers and the Isis-Urania Temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a society of esoteric inquiry focused on magic, symbolism, and motifs derived from classical and folk myths. She worked closely with William Butler Yeats who was also a member of the Golden Dawn, particularly on stage designs and costumes for his plays. Her unique position within artistic and mystical circles, combined with her profound empathy,24 creative energy, and remarkable capacity for work,25 established her as a cultural conduit and catalyst for collaboration between artists, esoteric practitioners, and theatre professionals.
- 26 Roy Foster, Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923, New York – London, W. (...)
- 27 Aodh de Blácam, What Sinn Féin Stands For. The Irish Republican Movement: Its History, Aims and Ide (...)
- 28 Ibid.
8Although not herself an Irish nationalist, she nonetheless engaged with artistic circles associated with Irish nationalism during a period when Irish culture and folklore were thriving on both sides of the Atlantic. MacManus made a notable breakthrough in the US literary market in 1899 and enjoyed considerable success in subsequent years. That same year, Jack Butler Yeats presented his first solo exhibition Sketches of Life in the West of Ireland, and William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Edward Martyn established the Irish Literary Theatre, underscoring a growing synergy between art and national identity. While Smith’s intentions were never political, her work became enmeshed in this nationalist cultural renaissance, helping to shape a distinctively Irish visual language through her professional illustration projects. As Roy Foster and Owen McGee26 have argued, the artistic and literary circles of this (pre-)revolutionary period had a radicalising effect, fostering a climate in which cultural expression and personal transformation became deeply intertwined with emerging political consciousness. Theatre groups, summer schools, literary and debating societies, and radical newspaper offices functioned as incubators for aesthetic experimentation and nationalist ideals. These dynamic cultural environments were harnessed and networked by Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) to transform what Aodh de Blácam called “the amorphous propaganda of the Gaelicised young men and women”27 into a “journalistically-united Intelligentsia”28 and, ultimately, the scaffolding for revolution.
The Sligo landscape in A Broad Sheet
- 29 This was published in 1902 and 1903 by Elkin Matthews, Ltd., a neighbour of William Butler Yeats in (...)
9A pivotal moment in Smith’s career arrived in 1902 with the launch of A Broad Sheet, a London-based monthly journal she co-founded with Jack Butler Yeats.29 Conceived as a single sheet measuring 18½ x 15 inches, A Broad Sheet became a striking vehicle for a gentle form of artistic and literary nationalist activism. Alongside poems, songs and short pieces of prose, Smith and Yeats contributed pen-and-ink illustrations largely inspired by Irish themes which were carved onto woodblocks by professional engravers for print production (see fig. 1). Smith matched Yeats’s output image for image but surpassed it by hand-colouring three hundred copies of each issue produced in 1902. By any reasonable measure, she emerged as the more industrious partner.
Fig. 1 – Details from Pamela Colman Smith’s illustrations for A Broad Sheet, June 1902 (left, centre) and August 1902 (right).
- 30 Each of the 1902 issues is reproduced in full colour in Stuart R. Kaplan, Mary K. Greer, Elizabeth (...)
10In their contributions to A Broad Sheet, both partners offered a rich visual homage to the landscapes and lore of western Ireland, with a particular emphasis on Sligo and its mythical and flesh-and-blood inhabitants. While Smith’s illustrative style remained distinctly her own, her subject matter was notably shaped by Yeats’s deep-rooted affinity for the county of his childhood. The monthly issues evoke a vivid sense of place: bogs in January; Back Strand Beach in February; the rugged Atlantic coast in March, April, and July; traditional cottages in April; country lanes in June; and a sea cave in July.30 These were punctuated by animated depictions of village and town life, as well as visual fragments drawn from Irish legend, all forming a tapestry that reflects their shared celebration of Irish identity and imagination.
- 31 This would be the raison d’être of journalist and Sinn Féiner William Bulfin’s Rambles in Eirinn, D (...)
- 32 Saorstát Éireann – Irish Free State Official Handbook, Bulmer Hobson (ed.), Dublin, The Talbot Pres (...)
11Together, Smith and Yeats foregrounded the distinctive visual character of County Sligo and its Atlantic coastline, interweaving elements of local life (beach horse races, village fairs, mail cars, and the ebb and flow of travellers, vagabonds, circus performers, ballad singers, and sailors) with recognisable features of the surrounding terrain. They affirmed the landscape not merely as a backdrop for human activity, but as a foundational element of national identity, one that lent symbolic resonance to the geography itself. Through this artistic interplay, the co-editors cast the Irish West as a locus of emergent postcolonial consciousness. This reframing functioned as a kind of visual decolonisation, stripping away the imposed veneer of Britishness to reveal the latent Irishness embedded in the environment.31 In foregrounding indigenous motifs and rhythms of local life, Smith and Yeats reasserted the landscape’s cultural autonomy, reclaiming it as a site of memory, resistance, and national self-fashioning, codifying the rugged coastlines, rolling hills, dry stone walls, bogs, and sea cliffs that continue to inform cultural representations of Ireland today. This strategic reframing, widely disseminated through early 20th-century print media, distilled the Irish landscape into a singular, romanticised ideal. Ultimately, the Saorstát Éireann – Irish Free State Official Handbook32 canonised this vision in 1932, adopting imagery of the West in fourteen images by artists such as Seán Keating, Maurice MacGonigal, Paul Henry, Sean O’Sullivan and Estella Solomons as the official visual identity of the nation.
- 33 Robert D. Benford, David A. Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessme (...)
12To unpack how these motifs translate into enduring cultural perceptions, it will be helpful to examine what David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford have called “framing processes”.33 The meaning of the Irish landscape is not a given. It is produced through interpretive processes mediated by culture. Conceptual frames contribute to this interpretive work
- 34 David A. Snow, Rens Vliegenthart, Pauline Ketelaars, “The Framing Perspective on Social Movements: (...)
[…] like picture frames, focusing attention by bracketing what in our sensual field is “in-frame” and what is “out-of-frame.” […] They also function as articulation mechanisms in the sense of tying together the various punctuated elements of the scene so that one coherent set of meanings rather than another is conveyed. […] And finally, frames often perform a transformative function by reconstituting the way in which some objects of attention are seen or understood as relating to each other or to the actor.34
Framing processes are pivotal in shaping social movements and public identity. This concept extends into the visual domain, where the deliberate framing of the content of pictures (especially through the picturesque tradition in the case of Ireland) does more than merely capture the natural landscape. It defines a specific, idealised version of that landscape as an integral part of national identity. This is a strategic process aimed at mobilising support for the nationalist cause. Over time, this selective portrayal has trained viewers to recognise only one essentially “Irish” landscape, effectively narrowing the way in which the environment is perceived. In this way, cultural framing not only shapes aesthetic sensibilities but also reinforces a singular national narrative that leaves little room for alternative visual interpretations.
- 35 In this context, “picturesque” signifies an aesthetic ideal akin to a framed painting, a harmonious (...)
- 36 Robert D. Benford, David A. Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements…”, p. 624.
- 37 William Gilpin (1724-1804), English clergyman, schoolmaster, and aesthetic theorist, is best known (...)
- 38 Sir Uvedale Price (1747-1829) was an English landowner, aesthetic theorist, and critic of prevailin (...)
- 39 Robert D. Benford, David A. Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements…”, p. 624.
13For example, from the 1770s, the adjective “rugged” was routinely deployed to evoke the picturesque35 quality of Irish landscapes and landscape art. This selective emphasis exemplifies what Snow and Benford call “frame amplification”,36 whereby particular visual elements such as natural irregularity and evocative texture are highlighted to intensify a specific interpretation of reality. Early advocates of the picturesque, including William Gilpin37 and Uvedale Price,38 deliberately framed the unrefined elements of the landscape as symbols of nature’s untamed beauty, capturing its allure alongside a romantically idealised, picture-like quality. Iconic landmarks like the Wicklow Mountains, Powerscourt Waterfall, the Giant’s Causeway, the Boyne Valley, Connemara, Killarney, and the Mourne Mountains were celebrated in ways that relegated human figures to secondary roles, merely providing scale or directing the viewer’s gaze. This top-down, culturally driven pedagogy effectively instructed viewers not only on where to look but also on how to experience nature through a refined, curated lens, a process that mirrors Snow and Benford’s notion of “frame alignment”39 by standardising public perception around a singular visual narrative.
- 40 Thomas Davis, Prose Writings of Thomas Davis, Thomas William Rolleston (ed.), London, Walter Scott, (...)
- 41 Ibid., p. 146-157.
- 42 See Claire Dubois, “L’histoire et les Penny Journals: réécriture du passé et construction identitai (...)
- 43 Tom Dunne, “Towards a National Art: George Petrie’s Two Versions of The Last Circuit of Pilgrims of (...)
14Clearly, the effort to forge a national visual identity did not originate in the early 20th century. As early as the 1840s, Young Irelander Thomas Davis was calling for a deliberate nationalist project to cultivate Irish art. In his newspaper writings, he lamented that Ireland had “Irish artists, but no Irish, no national art”.40 His approach was pedagogical: the Irish public, he believed, needed to be taught how to see. They required visual models, and Ireland itself needed to be conceptually framed by an artistic and political elite.41 Among the most influential suppliers of visual models was Davis’s friend, the artist and antiquarian George Petrie (1790-1866). Through his editorial work on the Dublin Penny Journal (1832-1833) and the Irish Penny Journal (1840-1841), Petrie advanced a historically grounded and visually rich vision of Irish nationhood.42 While never a political nationalist, his illustrations and essays fused landscape, ritual, and memory into a distinctly Irish aesthetic – precisely the kind of national art Davis had envisioned. Petrie’s two versions of The Last Circuit of Pilgrims at Clonmacnoise (c. 1828 and c. 1842) are emblematic of this vision, steeped in poetic and historical resonance.43 This mission was later taken up by Sinn Féin activists in the early 1900s, who worked in tandem with artists of the Smith and Yeats generation to realise Davis’s goal. Bulmer Hobson, editor of the Irish Free State Official Handbook, emerged as a key figure in this movement. Alongside Arthur Griffith and other leading Sinn Féiners, Hobson helped bridge the framing strategies of Davis’s nationalist circle with the revolutionary activism that culminated in the struggle for independence after 1916.
Visions of Mayo in The Green Sheaf
- 44 Joan Coldwell, “Pamela Colman Smith and the Yeats Family”, p. 31.
- 45 Jack Butler Yeats, quoted in Marcus Katz, Tali Goodwin, Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot…, p. 124-1 (...)
- 46 Anthony Raftery’s (1779-1835) work was never written down in his lifetime. Lady Gregory collected t (...)
15In 1903, Smith broke with Yeats and launched her own monthly journal, The Green Sheaf which measured 9 x 11 inches and contained up to 15 pages, sometimes with loose-leaf supplements.44 She continued the visual nation-building practice begun in A Broad Sheet and asked contributors “to draw pictures of places they would have liked to live in and write stories and poems about a life they would have liked to have lived”.45 The first issue of The Green Sheaf included an image of just such an ideal place in the form of a large illustration (fig. 2) for “The Hill of Heart’s Desire”, Lady Gregory’s translation of Anthony Raftery’s “Cnocín Saibhir”.46
Fig. 2 – Pamela Colman Smith, illustration for Lady Gregory’s translation of “The Hill of Heart’s Desire” by Anthony Raftery.
The Green Sheaf, no. 1, 1903, p. 2.
Here is an extract from the text which appeared below the image:
- 47 Anthony Raftery, “The Hill of Heart’s Desire”, Lady Gregory (trad.), The Green Sheaf, no. 1, 1903, (...)
The lamb and the sheep are there, the cow and the calf are there, fine land is there without heath and without bog. Ploughing and seed-sowing in the right month, and plough and harrow prepared and ready; the rent that is called for there, they have means to pay it; oats and flax there, and large eared barley; beautiful valleys with good growth in them, and hay. Rods grow there, and bushes and tufts, white fields are there and respect for trees; shade and shelter from wind and rain; priests and friars reading their book; spending and getting is there, and nothing scarce.47
- 48 One of Smith’s letters “gives an enthusiastic account of a week’s stay with Jack Butler Yeats and h (...)
- 49 George Petrie, through his pioneering antiquarian research and evocative paintings – especially tho (...)
- 50 Killary Harbour, often described as Ireland’s only fjord, may more accurately be classified as a fj (...)
Raftery’s poem is an idealised version of his home county of Mayo. We discover a beautiful, bog-free landscape of lush valleys, flourishing bushes, fertile fields, sheltering trees and, above all, the sharp-edged hill at its heart, translated by Lady Gregory as “the hill of heart’s desire”. Depicting the blind poet calling to mind the only landscape he had ever seen with his eyes, Smith crafts a visual synthesis out of a florilegium of landscape features borrowed from other people’s memories,48 photographs, maps and paintings. We find one of Mayo’s five round towers,49 red-roofed, limewashed cottages dotted throughout, the fjord (or fjärd50) at Killary harbour and a continental-style, fantasy version of Ashford Castle. Obviously, neither the poem nor the illustration is meant to convey what Mayo really looked like. Smith’s version is a montage of visual motifs that she had earlier developed in illustrations of Sligo, conjuring a boldly graphic (somewhat Japanesque) and imaginative vision of the West of Ireland.
- 51 Marcus Katz, Tali Goodwin, Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot…, p. 123.
- 52 Winchelsea is a small historic town located in East Sussex, England, near the coast and close to th (...)
- 53 Marcus Katz, Tali Goodwin, Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot…, p. 129.
16British magician Marcus Katz contends that the poem and accompanying illustration “set the inner nature of what would six years later become the tarot”.51 In his interpretation, the nurturing landscape depicted there threads its way through all seventy-eight cards of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, crafting scenes that feel subtly interconnected, both visually and emotionally. Katz locates the origin of these motifs in the real landscape of Winchelsea52 where Smith visited her friend Ellen Terry,53 a setting imbued with emotion and personal symbolism for the artist.
17Yet the landscape elements Katz highlights had already appeared in A Broad Sheet, where Smith used them to visualise County Sligo. Even if the original inspiration stemmed from English terrain (I find no reason to disagree with Katz here), Smith’s consistent reuse across her projects suggests intentional repurposing. Her landscapes do more than reflect topography: they signify the Irish West, forming part of a symbolic grammar that informs the work of cultural nationalists at the time. Her audience had, therefore, been sufficiently mobilised by the pedagogical framing processes employed by Smith and her contemporaries to receive the intended message that this was an image of the Irish heartland and could be no other place.
An introduction to cartomancy and the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot (1909)
- 54 William Rider published Bram Stoker’s wildly successful Dracula in 1897.
- 55 I am using the 1910 edition of this book for my references: Arthur Edward Waite, The Key to the Tar (...)
18After a decade of collaboration with Irish artists in London’s artistic, literary, and esoteric circles, Smith was commissioned by Arthur Edward Waite to provide the vital visual component for his radical reworking of the tarot. While many commentators (and some publishers) have retained the original trademarked name “Rider-Waite”, cartomancy practitioners increasingly refer to the most popular tarot deck in the world as the “Rider-Waite-Smith” (RWS). This better reflects the fact that its global success stems from the fortuitous combination of William Rider’s commercial acumen,54 Smith’s striking designs, and Waite’s fusion of mystical symbolism with structured guidance. Smith’s monogram appears on all seventy-eight cards, while Waite’s personality is embedded more discreetly in the deck’s conceptual framework and text of his accompanying book, The Key to the Tarot.55
- 56 Detlef Hoffmann, Le monde de la carte à jouer, Leipzig, Edition Leipzig, 1972, p. 15-17.
- 57 Tarots enluminés: chefs d’œuvre de la Renaissance italienne, Thierry Depaulis (ed.), Paris, Lienart (...)
19In the 21st century, tarot cards have evolved into versatile tools rich in symbolic imagery. They now serve multiple functions: introspection, spiritual guidance, storytelling, inspiration, decision-making, meditation, magical spellwork and, of course, divination. The structure of the modern tarot deck originated in 15th-century northern Italy with the trionfi, a trick-taking game. This deck was comprised of fifty-six standard cards (later known as the Minor Arcana) and twenty-two superior trionfi or trumps, bearing allegorical meaning, which evolved into the Major Arcana.56 By the century’s end, tarocchi / tarocco had spread to France, and the first documentary reference to taraux cards appears in Avignon in 1505.57 Throughout the 16th century, these would develop into the jeu de tarot that we know today.
- 58 Antoine Court de Gébelin’s seminal work on the tarot appears in volume 8 of his encyclopedic series (...)
- 59 Jean-Baptiste Alliette, Etteilla, ou manière de se récréer avec un jeu de cartes, Paris, Lesclapart (...)
- 60 Éliphas Lévi, Dogme et rituel de la haute magie, Paris, Germer Baillière, 1856, vol. 1.
- 61 Robert M. Place, “The Mythical History of the Tarot”, in The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divinat (...)
20The tarot’s esoteric significance emerged in the 18th century when French pastor Antoine Court de Gébelin (1719-1784) asserted that the seventy-eight-card deck preserved traces of ancient (possibly Egyptian) mystical wisdom.58 His contemporary, Parisian seed merchant (and subsequently print dealer) Jean-Baptiste Alliette, or “Etteilla” (1738-1791), formalised the tarot as a system for cartomancy, assigning specific divinatory meanings to each card.59 In the 19th century, Éliphas Lévi (1810-1875) connected the twenty-two Major Arcana to the Kabbalah,60 a move that shaped the work of later occultists such as Papus (Gérard Encausse), Oswald Wirth, and Aleister Crowley.61
21By the late 19th century, divinatory tarot reading had become a well-established – though still marginal – practice. These readings were conducted by specialists who worked with the Tarot de Marseille, Etteilla decks, or standard playing cards, and who had memorised extensive systems of numerological, astrological, and symbolic correspondences. When using tarot cards designed specifically for divination, practitioners typically relied on decks where only the twenty-two Major Arcana bore elaborate illustrations. The remaining fifty-six cards, known as the Minor Arcana, consisted of unadorned “pip cards” (numbered ace through ten) and court cards (page, knight, queen, king) arranged in four suits, closely resembling the structure of modern playing card decks.
- 62 Mary K. Greer, “Pamela’s Legacy”, in Stuart R. Kaplan, Mary K. Greer, Elizabeth Foley O’Connor, Mel (...)
- 63 Ibid.
- 64 Ibid.
- 65 Joan Coldwell, “Pamela Colman Smith and the Yeats Family”, p. 32.
22This changed dramatically in the first decade of the 20th century. Seeking to open the tarot up to more personal and intuitive approaches and a wider audience, Waite proposed a radical overhaul in 1909. Rejecting the rigid deferential, gatekeeping of his predecessors, he conceived a user-centred deck set in the scaffolding of structured guidance rather than fixed meanings to be learnt by heart. The often very vague suggestions offered in his Key to the Tarot allow the reader enormous freedom to craft stories and identify connections within their own lives and queries. The hall mark of the RWS deck lies in its “emblematic designs readily suitable for divination”, which stand in sharp contrast to the numerology and rigid depictions of swords, batons, cups, and coins found in earlier tarot decks.62 While the Major Arcana followed Waite’s symbolic vision, they also retain a static quality reminiscent of the Gothic woodcut tradition that preceded them.63 In contrast, the Minor Arcana, crafted mostly by Smith with minimal input from Waite, “are like animated storyboard sketches and character studies. They convey for the most part, mobility and action, caught in mid-movement”64 and reflect her experience in theatre design. They are also notable for the same strong colouring she used in A Broad Sheet,65 reproduced mechanically in this case via chromolithography.
- 66 A good example would be Giotto’s (1267-1337) minimalist landscapes.
23Before the RWS, tarot cards had minimal or purely allegorical backgrounds. The Tarot de Marseille, for example, features flat scenes with little or no environmental context. The Major Arcana have symbolic figures, but the Minor Arcana (especially the pip cards) are largely decorative and lack narrative information. Pre-divinatory Italian and French decks from the 15th to 18th centuries often used bold colours and stylised forms, but again, the backgrounds were sparse, and more ornamental than illustrative. This is similar to the symbolic mountains, trees, rivers, and buildings we find in Gothic and Proto-Renaissance religious art.66 In both contexts, the focus was primarily on the central figures, often set against plain or lightly patterned backdrops.
- 67 The Sola Busca tarot created in late 15th-century Italy was also fully illustrated. Smith is believ (...)
- 68 This development is reminiscent of the Limbourg brothers’ landscape backgrounds in Les Très Belles (...)
24The RWS deck introduced fully illustrated scenes for all seventy-eight cards, including the Minor Arcana.67 These backgrounds added symbolic depth and storytelling, making the cards more intuitive and accessible for interpretation. Readers no longer had to memorise large quantities of data in advance and could improvise around the images. Crucially, rather than framing her figures against abstract or allegorical backgrounds, Smith anchors them in the familiar features of her version of the Irish West, infusing her cards with a profound sense of place.68 Arguably, therefore, the deck transcends its intended role as a divinatory instrument and becomes a dynamic canvas where human activity is contextualised (by Smith) within the framework of Ireland’s history and human geography, transforming what would be empty space in other decks into meaningful places potentially overflowing with vivid narratives.
Tarot landscapes
- 69 Ace, Two, Five, Seven, Eight, Nine, and Ten of Wands; Two, Five, Eight, and Ten of Cups; Two, Five, (...)
25Having outlined the broader cultural, historical and visual contexts that shaped Smith’s tarot illustrations, I will now turn to a brief analysis of individual cards within the Minor Arcana. While Waite’s influence remains ambiguous for this subset of the deck, many cards bear unmistakable traces of Smith’s Irish artistic vocabulary. Nineteen69 of the Minor Arcana cards (roughly one third of the total) stand out for their clear visual echoes of her earlier Irish work. To illustrate the interpretive potential of this connection, I will examine three cards: the Eight of Cups, the Two of Swords, and the Ten of Cups (see fig. 3-5 below). This initial selection serves as a starting point for a broader investigation – my analysis of the entire RWS deck is ongoing. Each card reveals landscape elements and compositional choices that align with motifs from her work on A Broad Sheet and The Green Sheaf. Beyond aesthetic resonance (both cards and illustrations are informed by her artistic training and contain similar landscape motifs), these cards arguably enable an expanded interpretive field, where Irish topography inflects the tarot’s symbolic grammar and deepens its divinatory possibilities, opening up a supplementary Irish layer of meaning.
Eight of Cups
26In this image (fig. 3), Smith depicts a striking figure clad in red, turning away from eight golden chalices neatly stacked in the foreground. Their posture suggests resolve as they set off towards a rugged, seaweed-covered coastline. This card has traditionally been interpreted as representing a conscious departure from a once-cherished state (the cups), suggesting a longing or need to leave behind what no longer nourishes the soul or a realisation that the current situation is lacking something essential. In the 21st century, this could mean a change of career, a decision to emigrate, or the end / beginning of a relationship, for example. Waite’s structured guidance is deliberately very vague on what this card might mean so almost any new departure could fit his gloss:
- 70 Arthur Edward Waite, The Key to the Tarot…, p. 126-127. Waite sees the figure as a man but there is (...)
A man of dejected aspect is deserting the cups of his felicity, enterprise, undertaking or previous concern. Divinatory Meanings: The card speaks for itself on the surface, but other readings are entirely antithetical – giving joy, mildness, timidity, honesty, modesty.70
- 71 In tarot symbolism, water often represents emotional, intuitive, and unconscious currents, along wi (...)
- 72 Philanthropist Albert Kahn’s “Archives de la planète” (1909-1931) was an ambitious photographic and (...)
- 73 The Aran Fisherman’s Drowned Child (1841) by Frederic William Burton is one of the best examples. W (...)
27There is no evidence that Waite provided Smith with a detailed visual brief for the Minor Arcana. While he may have suggested thematic elements such as water71 or a figure turning away, it is widely accepted that the specific imagery was left to Smith’s creative discretion. Her choice to render a recognisable depiction of the Atlantic coast, complete with seaweed-covered rocks, was, therefore, deliberate. This coastal motif echoes the landscapes she had previously explored in her illustration work, particularly those images rooted in the western Irish seaboard. Another distinctly Irish element appears in the figure’s clothing, which recalls the traditional Claddagh red jacquard shawl. This garment, familiar today to viewers of Albert Kahn’s “Archives de la planète”,72 recurs in 19th and early 20th-century representations of Galway women73 and further anchors the image in Irish visual culture. Smith could have opted for a generic seascape, but instead drew from her Sligo / Mayo visual repertoire (supplemented here by a symbol of County Galway).
28The reuse of these visual elements is precisely what makes the image distinctly Irish. Rather than simply reflecting the landscape, Smith’s choices contributed to a broader cultural effort to define it. As artists repeatedly depicted specific terrains and motifs, they imbued them with national significance. This scene is perceived as Irish because it draws from a visual vocabulary that was consciously shaped to resonate with Irish identity. Similar Atlantic settings recur in the Five of Swords, the Ten of Swords, and the Two of Swords (below), reinforcing this symbolic terrain across the deck.
Two of Swords
- 74 Arthur Edward Waite, The Key to the Tarot…, p. 135. For clarification, “concord in a state of arms” (...)
29In the Two of Swords (fig. 4), a blindfolded woman sits on a stone bench, her arms crossed as she grips two swords close to her chest. Behind her stretches a placid sea, punctuated by rocks and an islet that subtly echo the coastal formations of counties Mayo and Sligo. Waite’s interpretive gloss – “Conformity and the equipoise which it suggests, courage, friendship, concord in a state of arms; another reading gives tenderness, affection, intimacy”74 – verges on opacity, offering little meaningful guidance and leaving interpretation firmly in the reader’s hands.
- 75 Johannes Fiebig, “Minor Arcana”, p. 218-219.
- 76 Elsinore Lodge, overlooking the harbour at Rosses Point, was one of several homes where the Yeats c (...)
30Arguably, the seascape here does more than serve as a conventional metaphor for emotions, the soul and the unconscious.75 It gestures toward a tangible geography reminiscent of Rosses Point, the coastal village five miles outside Sligo town where the Yeats family spent their summers.76 Smith had already rehearsed this visual terrain in her work for A Broad Sheet, and rather than relying on a generic water feature to support the allegory, she deliberately reintroduces a motif embedded in both her personal visual lexicon and the intimate family history of her former creative partner. This act of reuse anchors the card’s emotional symbolism in an emergent postcolonial landscape, suggesting not just artistic economy but a subtle reinscription of Irish place into the esoteric terrain of the tarot and an act of quiet resistance.
Ten of Cups
- 77 Arthur Edward Waite, The Key to the Tarot…, p. 126.
31For Waite, the Ten of Cups (fig. 5) represents “[c]ontentment, repose of the entire heart; the perfection of that state”.77 Smith’s illustration is in perfect agreement and offers us what is perhaps the most idealised vision of emotional fulfilment within the Minor Arcana. Yet beneath the universally comprehensible rainbow of symbolic harmony lies a distinctly Irish architectural anchor. The cottage depicted in the midground recalls the traditional limewashed homes of the Irish countryside, a recurring motif in nationalist illustrations and rural preservationist imagery.
- 78 Tricia Cusack, “A ‘Countryside Bright with Cosy Homesteads’: Irish Nationalism and the Cottage Land (...)
- 79 Ibid., p. 235.
32For Tricia Cusack this is a form of Michael Billig’s “banal nationalism”, or “the daily inculcation of nationhood by means of and array of barely-noticed signs”.78 The cottage landscape in particular, “carried the country’s domestic and pious ideals to the heart of authentic Ireland”.79 Smith’s choice to include this specific vernacular structure is significant: it localises the utopian tableau not in an abstract pastoral, but in a lived landscape tied to Irish domestic identity. The cottage amplifies the themes of fidelity, peace, and generational rootedness that the card embodies. As with the Eight of Cups and Two of Swords, Smith could have leaned on generic symbols to express emotional union, but instead weaves a familiar detail from her earlier Irish visual repertoire into the scene. The result is more than just a backdrop: it is a subtle framing of a recognisably Irish home as cultural place, infusing the card with nationalist undertones masked by domestic serenity. A similar cottage is depicted in the Two of Cups.
Conclusion
- 80 “The reuse and copying of woodcuts was a widespread practice during the early period of print. […] (...)
- 81 See Elizabeth Foley O’Connor, “Pamela’s Life” (especially the chapters “Emergence as a Professional (...)
- 82 See the official website here for images: https://www.wildatlanticway.com.
33Was Smith’s reuse of Irish landscape elements in her tarot designs simply a pragmatic decision, in keeping with historical practices of printers and publishers who often repurposed images to reduce costs?80 Smith was renowned for her entrepreneurial spirit81 and would certainly have found it practical to repurpose modular elements from her existing repertoire, allowing her to produce new works both quickly and economically. This is entirely possible and even probable. And yet, this explanation is only part of the story. The cultural nationalists with whom Smith associated were deeply committed to constructing a canon of distinctly Irish images that would visually distinguish their country from its colonial neighbour and help their compatriots to visualise an independent Ireland. Their efforts to create a cohesive and recognisable postcolonial visual identity for Ireland were remarkably effective, shaping not only artistic expression but also public perception. This success was so profound that contemporary viewers, when envisioning an Irish landscape, often default to the imagery crafted by these early 20th-century artists. This is not merely a retrospective recognition of Irish landscapes in the works of Smith, Yeats, and their contemporaries; rather, it is the result of their deliberate and collective effort to define and promote a vision of Ireland and frame how the public would interact with their environment. In short, today we tend not to be able to imagine the Irish landscape in any other way. Publicity for the “Wild Atlantic Way” tourist trail (officially launched in 2014) contains exactly the same West of Ireland landscape features as the 1932 Irish Free State Official Handbook and the landscape art of the first two decades of the 20th century.82
34Crucially, Smith did not set out to inscribe “Irishness” into her tarot imagery through overt nationalist symbolism. Instead, she invoked it through the same subtle visual framing techniques found in her illustration work, allowing Irishness to surface through the viewer’s own imaginative engagement. Smith’s compositional choices, grounded in her earlier Irish projects, establish a visual grammar that invites postcolonial readings without demanding them. The Sligo coastlines, limewashed cottages, bogs and hills embedded in these scenes function not as explicit declarations of place, but as latent markers of cultural meaning. Their recognition depends on the viewer’s framing context, on primed associations, visual traditions, and mnemonic echoes. Irishness is not imposed but emergent.
35In this light, Smith’s tarot cards align with the wider cultural project of nationalist image-making without being nationalist themselves. The Irish landscape we visualise today is not an organic inheritance, but a carefully constructed aesthetic model shaped by artists, illustrators, and cultural revivalists. Smith’s work, through both her journals and her tarot illustrations, contributed to this visual canon. Her images do not claim Irish territory, they facilitate its (re)discovery. In doing so, the RWS deck functions as both mystical tool and mnemonic device, allowing viewers to intuit national place through symbolic terrain. Smith’s quiet interventions helped define the contours of Irish identity, not by prescription, but by framing.
Notes
1 The dual purpose of this symposium was to revisit the history of play as a research method and theoretical expression, and to explore the contemporary playability of research-creation.
2 Arthur Edward Waite (1857-1942) was an American-born British poet, mystic, and occult scholar. A member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Waite wrote extensively on Western esotericism, mysticism, and Freemasonry, and was among the first to approach occult traditions as a spiritual heritage rather than pseudoscience.
3 Joan Coldwell, “Pamela Colman Smith and the Yeats Family”, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 3, no. 2, November 1977, p. 27-34.
4 Stuart R. Kaplan was the founder of US Games Systems, Inc., the US publisher of the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot and custodian of a large archive of materials relating to Smith.
5 British magician Marcus Katz in particular has outlined this theory very succinctly on his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDfD5sjRisI and in his book: Marcus Katz, Tali Goodwin, Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot: The True Story of the World’s Most Popular Tarot, Woodbury, Llewellyn Publications, 2015.
6 The British Library and National Library of Ireland catalogues list Smith as a mere contributor rather than co-creator and co-editor. Hilary Pyle mentions Smith only once in The Different Worlds of Jack B. Yeats: His Cartoons and Illustration (Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 1994, p. 32), calling her Yeats’s “co-illustrator”. The title of the anonymous note “Jack B. Yeats’s ‘a broad sheet’”, Irish Studies Review, vol. 4, no. 15, 1996, p. 38, erases Smith altogether.
7 Hilary Pyle, the biographer of Jack Butler Yeats, is consistently dismissive of Smith.
8 Founded in 1887 by oil magnate and philanthropist Charles Pratt, the Pratt Institute provided practical and affordable education to people of all backgrounds regardless of class, gender, or race.
9 In 1893, Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922) was appointed assistant curator of the Japanese collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and taught at Pratt from 1896 to 1903 where his pedagogy was considered revolutionary.
10 This is a genre of Japanese art that flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Hokusai and Hiroshige were perhaps the most famous of the Ukiyo-e masters.
11 Pierre-Louis Mathieu, La génération symboliste: 1870-1910, Geneva, Skira, 1990; Ukiyo-e Prints and the Impressionist Painters: Meeting of the East and the West, Tatsuji Ohmori (ed.), Tokyo, Committee for the Year 2001, 1979; Patricia Eckert Boyer, Phillip Dennis Cate, L’estampe originale: Artistic Printmaking in France, 1893-1895, Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum, 1991.
12 “Als Ik Kan, Notes, Reviews”, The Craftsman, vol. 11, no. 6, March 1907, p. 770.
13 Yeats wrote: “I should feel safe getting her to illustrate anything” after meeting her to arrange a publishing project with his son William (John Butler Yeats, Letters to His Son W. B. Yeats and Others, 1869-1922, Joseph Hone (ed.), New York, E. P. Dutton, 1946, p. 61).
14 Elizabeth Foley O’Connor, “Pamela’s Life”, in Stuart R. Kaplan, Mary K. Greer, Elizabeth Foley O’Connor, Melinda Boyd Parsons, Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story, Stamford, U.S. Games Systems, Inc., 2018, p. 66.
15 Their paths likely crossed through publishing networks or mutual acquaintances in the folklore and arts scene, and Smith’s published artwork (1898) for William Butler Yeats’s The Land of Heart’s Desire may have been the reason they met. From his first visit to the United States in 1898-1899 onwards, MacManus became a frequent contributor to leading American periodicals. See Christopher Cusack, “‘Seanachie to the New World’: Seumas MacManus and the Transatlantic Appeal of Irish Local Colour”, Open Library of Humanities, vol. 8, no. 2, 2022, DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.8981.
16 Seumas MacManus, In Chimney Corners: Merry Tales of Irish Folk Lore, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith, New York, Doubleday & McClure Co., 1889.
17 Elizabeth Foley O’Connor, “Pamela’s Life”, p. 30-32.
18 Her itinerary has, unfortunately, not been recorded. She may have travelled via Enniskillen / Strabane or taken a longer route via Galway and Sligo.
19 Joan Coldwell, “Pamela Colman Smith and the Yeats Family”, p. 30.
20 There has been speculation that Stoker was a member of the Golden Dawn but there is as yet no proof.
21 Elizabeth Foley O’Connor, “Pamela’s Life”, p. 40.
22 Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats: A Biography, London, Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1970, p. 67.
23 Elizabeth Foley O’Connor, “Pamela’s Life”, p. 42.
24 This capacity for empathy is evident in her intuitive grasp of her collaborators’ artistic intentions. William Butler Yeats notably remarked that she alone truly understood the aims of his theatrical work (Elizabeth Foley O’Connor, “Pamela’s Life”, p. 43). Her reputation as a mystic or medium may well have stemmed from this rare (particularly among her male contemporaries) ability to attune to the creative visions of others.
25 Ellen Terry described her as “extraordinarily industrious and ever-lastingly making & selling as fast as she makes” (Ellen Terry, The Collected Letters of Ellen Terry, vol. 4, 1899-1904, Katharine Cockin (ed.), Milton Park, Taylor & Francis, 2013, p. 88).
26 Roy Foster, Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923, New York – London, W. W. Norton & Co., 2015, p. 163-197; Owen McGee, The IRB: The Irish Republican Brotherhood, from the Land League to Sinn Féin, Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2005, p. 266-300.
27 Aodh de Blácam, What Sinn Féin Stands For. The Irish Republican Movement: Its History, Aims and Ideals, Examined as to Their Significance to the World, Dublin, Mellifont Press, 1921, p. 45.
28 Ibid.
29 This was published in 1902 and 1903 by Elkin Matthews, Ltd., a neighbour of William Butler Yeats in London.
30 Each of the 1902 issues is reproduced in full colour in Stuart R. Kaplan, Mary K. Greer, Elizabeth Foley O’Connor, Melinda Boyd Parsons, Pamela Colman Smith…, p. 166-177.
31 This would be the raison d’être of journalist and Sinn Féiner William Bulfin’s Rambles in Eirinn, Dublin, M. H. Gill & Son Ltd., 1907 and much of the work of Sinn Féin propagandist Arthur Griffith.
32 Saorstát Éireann – Irish Free State Official Handbook, Bulmer Hobson (ed.), Dublin, The Talbot Press, 1932.
33 Robert D. Benford, David A. Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment”, Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 26, 2000, p. 611-639.
34 David A. Snow, Rens Vliegenthart, Pauline Ketelaars, “The Framing Perspective on Social Movements: Its Conceptual Roots and Architecture”, in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements [2018], David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, Hanspeter Kriesi, Holly J. McCammon (eds.), 2nd ed., Oxford, Wiley Blackwell, 2019, p. 393.
35 In this context, “picturesque” signifies an aesthetic ideal akin to a framed painting, a harmonious blend of art and nature that bridges the orderly beautiful and the awe-inspiring sublime.
36 Robert D. Benford, David A. Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements…”, p. 624.
37 William Gilpin (1724-1804), English clergyman, schoolmaster, and aesthetic theorist, is best known for originating the concept of the picturesque in landscape appreciation. His influential first publication on the subject was An Essay upon Prints: Containing Remarks upon the Principles of Picturesque Beauty, the Different Kinds of Prints, and the Characters of the Most Noted Masters, London, J. Robson, 1768.
38 Sir Uvedale Price (1747-1829) was an English landowner, aesthetic theorist, and critic of prevailing landscape design. His seminal work was An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful, London, J. Robson, 1794.
39 Robert D. Benford, David A. Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements…”, p. 624.
40 Thomas Davis, Prose Writings of Thomas Davis, Thomas William Rolleston (ed.), London, Walter Scott, 1889, p. 155.
41 Ibid., p. 146-157.
42 See Claire Dubois, “L’histoire et les Penny Journals: réécriture du passé et construction identitaire”, Études irlandaises, no. 34-1, 2009, DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesirlandaises.2571.
43 Tom Dunne, “Towards a National Art: George Petrie’s Two Versions of The Last Circuit of Pilgrims of Clonmacnoise: The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past”, in George Petrie (1790-1866): The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past, Peter Murray (ed.), Cork, Gandon, 2004, p. 126-135.
44 Joan Coldwell, “Pamela Colman Smith and the Yeats Family”, p. 31.
45 Jack Butler Yeats, quoted in Marcus Katz, Tali Goodwin, Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot…, p. 124-125.
46 Anthony Raftery’s (1779-1835) work was never written down in his lifetime. Lady Gregory collected this poem in the area around where she lived in Coole Park, County Galway and published it for the first time in Poets and Dreamers: Studies and Translations from the Irish, Dublin, Hodges, Figgis & Co., 1903.
47 Anthony Raftery, “The Hill of Heart’s Desire”, Lady Gregory (trad.), The Green Sheaf, no. 1, 1903, p. 2.
48 One of Smith’s letters “gives an enthusiastic account of a week’s stay with Jack Butler Yeats and his wife in their Devonshire cottage. She admired both of them as artists and loved the stories they told of Sligo and Lady Gregory” (Joan Coldwell, “Pamela Colman Smith and the Yeats Family”, p. 29).
49 George Petrie, through his pioneering antiquarian research and evocative paintings – especially those of Clonmacnoise – played a central role in cementing the round tower as a symbol of Irish cultural identity. His work not only catalogued these architectural features with scholarly precision but also infused them with romantic nationalism, linking them indelibly to the Irish landscape in both academic and popular imagination.
50 Killary Harbour, often described as Ireland’s only fjord, may more accurately be classified as a fjärd due to its gentler relief and sediment-filled glacial origins.
51 Marcus Katz, Tali Goodwin, Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot…, p. 123.
52 Winchelsea is a small historic town located in East Sussex, England, near the coast and close to the town of Rye.
53 Marcus Katz, Tali Goodwin, Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot…, p. 129.
54 William Rider published Bram Stoker’s wildly successful Dracula in 1897.
55 I am using the 1910 edition of this book for my references: Arthur Edward Waite, The Key to the Tarot: Being Fragments of a Secret Tradition under the Veil of Divination, London, William Rider & Son, 1910.
56 Detlef Hoffmann, Le monde de la carte à jouer, Leipzig, Edition Leipzig, 1972, p. 15-17.
57 Tarots enluminés: chefs d’œuvre de la Renaissance italienne, Thierry Depaulis (ed.), Paris, Lienart, 2021, p. 27. The cards themselves certainly arrived in France before this date.
58 Antoine Court de Gébelin’s seminal work on the tarot appears in volume 8 of his encyclopedic series Le monde primitif, analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne, Paris, Gébelin, 1781, in a chapter titled “Du jeu des tarots”.
59 Jean-Baptiste Alliette, Etteilla, ou manière de se récréer avec un jeu de cartes, Paris, Lesclapart, 1770.
60 Éliphas Lévi, Dogme et rituel de la haute magie, Paris, Germer Baillière, 1856, vol. 1.
61 Robert M. Place, “The Mythical History of the Tarot”, in The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, New York, J. P. Tarcher, 2005, p. 29-82; Paul Huson, “Of Cartomancy and the Tarot”, in Mystical Origins of the Tarot: From Ancient Roots to Modern Usage, Rochester, Destiny Books, 2004, p. 43-70. It should be noted that Crowley, like William Butler Yeats, Waite and Smith, was a member of the Golden Dawn.
62 Mary K. Greer, “Pamela’s Legacy”, in Stuart R. Kaplan, Mary K. Greer, Elizabeth Foley O’Connor, Melinda Boyd Parsons, Pamela Colman Smith…, p. 372.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid.
65 Joan Coldwell, “Pamela Colman Smith and the Yeats Family”, p. 32.
66 A good example would be Giotto’s (1267-1337) minimalist landscapes.
67 The Sola Busca tarot created in late 15th-century Italy was also fully illustrated. Smith is believed to have discovered it in 1907 at an exhibition at the British Museum, through black-and-white photographs sold to the museum by the Busca-Serbelloni family of Milan. This exhibition is mentioned in the Guide to the Collection of Early Italian Engravings: Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings, Including a Catalogue of an Exhibition of Selected Examples, London, British Museum, 1923, p. 34.
68 This development is reminiscent of the Limbourg brothers’ landscape backgrounds in Les Très Belles Heures du duc de Berry (c. 1405-1409) which represent a major aesthetic shift in manuscript illumination. Departing from the abstract grounds of earlier Gothic art, they introduced naturalistic scenery (rolling hills, atmospheric skies, and detailed architecture) often based on real locations familiar to their patron.
69 Ace, Two, Five, Seven, Eight, Nine, and Ten of Wands; Two, Five, Eight, and Ten of Cups; Two, Five, Six, Ten, and Page of Swords; Seven, Page, and Knight of Pentacles.
70 Arthur Edward Waite, The Key to the Tarot…, p. 126-127. Waite sees the figure as a man but there is no indication of gender in the image. Modern practitioners are flexible on this subject.
71 In tarot symbolism, water often represents emotional, intuitive, and unconscious currents, along with spiritual insight and dream logic. Tidal waters, as shown here, also suggest life’s cyclical transitions. See Johannes Fiebig, “Minor Arcana”, in The Tarot of A. E. Waite and P. Colman Smith: The Story of the World’s Most Popular Tarot, Johannes Fiebig (ed.), Cologne, Taschen, 2023, p. 218-219.
72 Philanthropist Albert Kahn’s “Archives de la planète” (1909-1931) was an ambitious photographic and film project aimed at documenting global cultures in transition. The Irish expedition was undertaken in May and June 1913 by Marguerite Mespoulet and Madeleine Mignon-Alba, whose photographs are considered the first colour images ever taken in Ireland. The collection is housed today at the Musée départemental Albert-Kahn in Saint-Cloud, France.
73 The Aran Fisherman’s Drowned Child (1841) by Frederic William Burton is one of the best examples. Waite describes the figure as a man in his gloss but as the image is open to interpretation, modern cartomancers do not always follow his lead.
74 Arthur Edward Waite, The Key to the Tarot…, p. 135. For clarification, “concord in a state of arms” suggests peace or agreement (concord) that exists amidst conflict or military readiness (a state of arms).
75 Johannes Fiebig, “Minor Arcana”, p. 218-219.
76 Elsinore Lodge, overlooking the harbour at Rosses Point, was one of several homes where the Yeats children spent their holidays with their Yeats and Middleton cousins. See William Butler Yeats, Reveries over Childhood and Youth, Dundrum, Cuala Press, 1915, p. 1-30.
77 Arthur Edward Waite, The Key to the Tarot…, p. 126.
78 Tricia Cusack, “A ‘Countryside Bright with Cosy Homesteads’: Irish Nationalism and the Cottage Landscape”, National Identities, vol. 3, no. 3, 2001, p. 221.
79 Ibid., p. 235.
80 “The reuse and copying of woodcuts was a widespread practice during the early period of print. […] The vast majority of woodcuts in my corpus are either reused or copied; entirely new designs are rare. Indeed, many designs draw on iconographic conventions that already circulated in manuscripts” (Andrea van Leerdam, Woodcuts as Reading Guides: How Images Shaped Knowledge Transmission in Medical-Astrological Books in Dutch (1500-1550), Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2024, p. 57).
81 See Elizabeth Foley O’Connor, “Pamela’s Life” (especially the chapters “Emergence as a Professional Artist” and “The Green Sheaf Press”), p. 11-99.
82 See the official website here for images: https://www.wildatlanticway.com.
Haut de pageTable des illustrations
![]() |
|
|---|---|
| Titre | Fig. 1 – Details from Pamela Colman Smith’s illustrations for A Broad Sheet, June 1902 (left, centre) and August 1902 (right). |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/docannexe/image/20808/img-1.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 384k |
![]() |
|
| Titre | Fig. 2 – Pamela Colman Smith, illustration for Lady Gregory’s translation of “The Hill of Heart’s Desire” by Anthony Raftery. |
| Crédits | The Green Sheaf, no. 1, 1903, p. 2. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/docannexe/image/20808/img-2.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 429k |
![]() |
|
| Titre | Fig. 3 – Pamela Colman Smith, “Eight of Cups”. |
| Crédits | Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, William Rider & Son, 1909. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/docannexe/image/20808/img-3.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 234k |
![]() |
|
| Titre | Fig. 4 – Pamela Colman Smith, “Two of Swords”. |
| Crédits | Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, William Rider & Son, 1909. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/docannexe/image/20808/img-4.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 243k |
![]() |
|
| Titre | Fig. 5 – Pamela Colman Smith, “Ten of Cups”. |
| Crédits | Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, William Rider & Son, 1909. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/docannexe/image/20808/img-5.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 293k |
Pour citer cet article
Référence papier
Mathew Staunton, « Framing Postcolonial Place: Towards an Irish Reading of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot », Études irlandaises, 50-2 | 2025, 53-70.
Référence électronique
Mathew Staunton, « Framing Postcolonial Place: Towards an Irish Reading of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot », Études irlandaises [En ligne], 50-2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 05 décembre 2025, consulté le 24 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/20808 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15aa0
Haut de pageDroits d’auteur
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.
Haut de page










