Marseille, Waite–Smith, and Thoth

Three names cover most of what a newcomer to tarot will actually encounter: the Tarot de Marseille pattern, the Rider–Waite–Smith deck, and the Thoth deck. This article names each honestly, including the collaborators whose names are too often left off.

The Tarot de Marseille is not one specific deck but a pattern — a family of decks sharing a common structure and imagery — that predates the Rider deck by centuries, reading the numbered Minor Arcana cards by their suit and count rather than by an illustrated scene. It is a lineage in its own right, not a rougher or earlier draft of what the Rider–Waite–Smith deck later did differently; the two read the pip cards on genuinely different principles, neither one a more "correct" tarot than the other.

Published by Rider in 1909, this deck is often called simply "the Waite deck" — a habit worth correcting. Arthur Edward Waite designed the deck's symbolic system, drawn out of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn's own framework, but Pamela Colman Smith drew all seventy-eight cards, including the fully-illustrated Minor Arcana pip scenes that made this deck's approach distinctive in the first place. Naming Smith alongside Waite whenever this deck comes up is not a courtesy; it is a correction of a routine erasure this track takes seriously.

Decades later, Aleister Crowley designed the Thoth deck's symbolic system, and Lady Frieda Harris painted it — years of work producing a deck whose imagery is entirely Harris's execution of Crowley's system. As with Waite and Smith, the deck is popularly known by the man's name alone; Harris is named here for the same reason Smith is: a woman did the drawing on two of the twentieth century's most influential decks, and both decks carry only the man's name in casual reference.

None of this is a claim that either deck is "really" its illustrator's rather than its designer's — both roles were genuinely collaborative, and both names belong to the finished work. It is a claim that a deck's history includes both people who made it, and that erasing one because convention has settled on the other's name is a small, correctable dishonesty this track does not repeat, here or anywhere else in Aurathea.