@tarotwithgord: The two biggest tarot decks were made by two men who couldn't stand each other. If you've ever wondered why one book tells you a card means one thing and another book swears it means something else, this is a big part of the answer. It starts in a secret club. London, 1888, a magic society called the Golden Dawn, built on a forged manuscript that had been artificially aged to look ancient. You joined, you learned their way of reading the cards, and you swore never to tell anyone outside. Arthur Edward Waite joined in 1891. A few years later Aleister Crowley joined too, and helped blow the whole thing apart. Both walked out with the same secret system. Then they did opposite things with it. Waite thought fortune-telling was vulgar. He wanted tarot to be something you sit and think with, so his deck had to work for anyone who picked it up. No secret club required. He didn't draw it. In 1909 he paid Pamela Colman Smith to do all 78 cards in about six months. He gave her proper instructions for the 22 big cards and basically a list of keywords for the other 56, so the pictures you read on those are hers. Before her, most number cards were five cups or eight swords and nothing else. She gave every one a scene. She got very little cash for it, was written out of the story for decades, and died in debt with an unmarked grave. Crowley thought Waite had made tarot far too polite. So he went the other way. His deck needs the secret teaching, astrology and a Jewish mystical system called Kabbalah just to get started, and it renames half the cards. Strength is Lust, Justice is Adjustment, the World is the Universe. He didn't paint his either. Lady Frieda Harris proposed it, paid him a stipend while she painted it over five years, and chose to keep her own name off it. One artist was left out. One opted out. Put the same card from each deck side by side and you can see the whole argument. Waite and Smith give you a skeleton on a horse, a bishop begging and the sun coming up behind, a story you can start reading with no training. Crowley and Harris give you shapes and symbols and expect you to have done the studying first. They couldn't even agree what card eight was. The Golden Dawn had swapped Strength and Justice round to make their astrology add up. Waite kept the swap, so his eight is Strength. Crowley swapped them back, so his eight is Adjustment and his eleven is Lust. Pick up your own deck. Which one is your eight? Both decks are still in print. Both have serious readers. Neither man had the original meaning, because there isn't one. There's 250 years of people deciding what these cards mean and disagreeing with whoever came before, and you get to join that argument rather than lose it. Level 1 of the Simply Tarot Course is called Tarot for Me for a reason. You come out of it trusting your own read of a card instead of waiting for a book to agree with you. Link in bio. #tarot #tarottok #tarothistory #riderwaitesmith #thothtarot

Tarot with Gord

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Sunday 06 September 2026 17:45:31 GMT