A complete tarot, engraved for this room

Behind the cards

Why we kept the old symbols

When Pamela Colman Smith illustrated the deck that became the Rider-Waite-Smith in 1909, she did something no deck had done before her: she gave every minor card a full scene. Before Smith, the Six of Swords was six swords in a row. After her, it was a ferryman, a bowed passenger, and water that is rough on one side of the boat and calm on the other. That picture is why a century of readers can look at the card and feel the crossing. Our deck keeps her scenes because they are the shared language, the way every chess set keeps the horse.

What we changed

The hour. Traditional decks live in full daylight; ours is painted in the last light of the day, when the lamps are coming on and the sky has not decided. We chose dusk because it is when people actually sit down with cards, and because it suits what a reading is: not the noon certainty of an answer, but the hour where you can still see two ways at once. Every one of the 78 scenes was illustrated for this site in that light, with one palette, so the deck reads as one world when the cards land together in a spread.

Reading with this deck

Because the symbols are traditional, any tarot book you own applies here, and every meaning page on this site was written to this deck's exact images: when The Moon's page mentions the dog and the wolf, you will find them on the card. If you learn on this deck, you can pick up any Rider-Waite-Smith descendant and be at home. That is the point of keeping the alphabet.