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I don’t believe in tarot. Which is to say, nobody can read me (or anybody else) in tarot cards, and nobody can read my future (nay anybody else’s future). I don’t believe in clairvoyance or psychic abilities. Not cartomancy, not divination, not paranormal precognition.

But I also do believe in tarot. On the right day, tarot cards can be a great tool for constructive reverie. The elegantly composed mix of symbols in the illustrations of a good deck can be very enticing, and sometimes — perhaps if it is slightly underplayed — the flamboyant ritual of tarot reading can be alluring, too. Through the power of this mystic beauty, the cards can inspire. When they light the spark of imagination, tarot is a rich source for creative practice.

When I thus pick up the tarot cards in hope that they will inspire me, I usually prefer my Smith-Waite deck. (In specific, I look at the Centennial Edition that I got my hands on a few years back, and which more faithfully reproduces the original design of the cards. This specific deck was published in 2009, one hundred years after the first edition was published in 1909.)

The Smith-Waite cards are called so because they were designed by British artist, illustrator, writer, publisher, and occultist Pamela Colman Smith (1878 – 1951) under the guidance of poet and mystic Arthur Edward Waite (1857 – 1942). Sometimes the deck is also referred to as Waite–Smith or Rider–Waite–Smith or just the Rider Tarot. (Rider, because the name of the first publisher of the cards was William Rider & Son.)

I don’t have a lot of patience for babbling and attention seeking mystics, and I have a hunch that Arthur Edward Waite was one: But he did write this, in a 1909 Occult Review article where he describes the tarot card deck that he and Coleman Smith were just then working on:

This is not […] a study in withdrawn areas of mystical philosophy, nor precisely an investigation of root-matters of symbolism, nor is it even exclusively an account of divination. […] After all the Tarot is a research in symbolism; its study is a mystic experiment; and though it has been, is and will be used for divination, it belongs to another realm and began therein.

“The Tarot: A Wheel of Fortune”

Still too babble-ish, perhaps? I find it a lot easier to get onboard with some quotes from Coleman Smith. Here she writes about creativity, in a 1908 Craftsman article:

Learn from everything, see everything, and above all feel everything! […]

Ugliness is beauty, but with a difference, a nobleness that speaks through all the hard crust of convention. […]

Banish fear, brace your courage, place your ideal high up with the sun, away from the dirt and squalor and ugliness around you and let that power that makes "the roar of the high-power presses" enter into your work — energy — courage — life — love. Use your wits, use your eyes. Perhaps you use your physical eyes too much and only see the mask. Find eyes within, look for the door into the unknown country.

“Should the Art Student Think?”

Further exploring the link between tarot and creativity, this is how British comic book writer and author Alan Moore and fellow comic writer Steve Moore (no relation) suggest using the cards:

Select a card, familiarising yourself with it until you can hold its image in your mind. Then […] this mental image is used as a door allowing access to the world of the specific card that you have chosen. Spend as long exploring the imaginary landscape as you like and then withdraw from the experience, ‘closing’ the door behind you and then entering your observation in your journal. Clearly this technique can be applied to almost any magically suggestive scene or symbol and although it may feel like no more than strenuous daydreaming, if the practice is continued it will yield, if nothing else, observable results in the extended scope of the practitioner’s imagination.

The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic

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