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A directory of 78 cards

Tarot cards

Every card of the deck Pamela Colman Smith drew for the printing of December 1909, with what Arthur Edward Waite wrote about it in 1911 quoted rather than rewritten.

Search the whole deck below by a card's name, by its suit, or by a word Waite used — his meanings are searchable too, so “love” finds the cards he glossed with it and not only The Lovers.

Searching the deck needs JavaScript. Without it the whole list is still below, and each suit has its own page: wands, cups, swords, pentacles.

Meanings quoted from A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, 1911. Each entry shows the opening of his divinatory meaning — or, for the few whose opening is too long for a list, a phrase from further in, with an ellipsis wherever words are left out. The card's own page gives it in full, along with his reversed meaning and his description of the picture.

Browse by suit

The four suits of the minor arcana correspond to clubs, hearts, spades and diamonds, but they are not their ancestors. The tarot and the ordinary pack share an ancestor: the four-suited playing cards already in use in Europe before the tarot was devised. The court cards had always shown figures; Smith's innovation was to draw a scene on every one of the forty numbered cards as well, where the packs in ordinary use printed them as arrangements of pips. A few older packs had done it, the Sola Busca of about 1490 among them, but hers made it usual — which is the main reason this deck, rather than an older one, is the deck most people picture.

Where the pictures come from

The deck was drawn by Pamela Colman Smith to Waite's direction and published by William Rider & Son in London in December 1909. Smith was paid a flat fee, received no royalties, and for most of the twentieth century the deck was named after Waite and its publisher alone. These files are scans of that first printing. It is in the public domain in the United Kingdom, where it was published, and in the United States.

Every card's source file and licence is listed on the credits page.