Known as the “Medieval Tarocchi” it’s also mistakenly known as the Gringonneur deck. Italy c. 1500. Read more Medieval Tarocchi (incomplete Tarot deck)
Medieval Tarocchi (incomplete Tarot deck)
Tarot
The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck
The Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck is one of the most popular tarot decks in use today in the English-speaking world. Other suggested names for this deck include the Rider-Waite, Waite-Smith, Waite-Colman Smith or simply the Rider deck. The cards were drawn by illustrator Pamela Colman Smith from the instructions of academic and mystic A. E. Waite, and published by the Rider Company in 1910.
The cards were originally published in 1910 by the publisher William Rider & Son of London. The following year, a small guide by A.E. Waite entitled The Key to the Tarot was bundled with the cards, providing an overview of the traditions and history behind the cards, criticism of various interpretations, and extensive descriptions of their symbols. The year after that, a revised version, Pictorial Key to the Tarot, was issued that featured black-and-white plates of all seventy-eight of Smith’s cards. Several later versions of the deck, such as the Universal Waite deck, copy the Smith line drawings with minor changes and add more sophisticated coloring. Read more The Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck
Why Tarot-ator
Why Tarot-ator? From where that “ator” comes and what it means?
Comte de Mellet in his essay “Study on the Tarots, and on Divination with Tarot cards” mentioned “The Book of Thoth” and identifies the author, the Egyptian God Thoth with the Roman God Mercury, which is similar to the Greek God Hermes. According to Comte de Mellet, Thoth was the first historian and he had also painted the gods on 22 plates or cards. “This book was to be named A-Rosh; from A, doctrines, science; and from Rosch (Rosh is the Egyptian name of Mercury and of its festival which is celebrated the first day of the new year), Mercury, which, joined to the article T, means pictures of the doctrines of Mercury; but as Rosh also means commencement, this word Ta-Rosh was particularly devoted to his cosmogony; just as Ethotia, the History of Time, was the title of his astronomy; and perhaps that Athothes, which one took for King, son of Thoth, is only the child of his genius, and the History of the kings of Egypt.” Read more Why Tarot-ator
