Tarot's matriarchal lineage · on International Women's Day

The most-used tarot deck in the world was painted by a woman whose name got rubbed off the back of the cards for the better part of seventy years. The Rider-Waite-Smith deck, which sits behind nearly every introductory book, app, and YouTube tutorial in print, is named for its publisher and one of its credited authors, both men. The third name on it, Smith, belongs to Pamela Colman Smith, who did the actual painting, all seventy-eight cards, including every single one of the minor arcana, which were the first fully illustrated minors in the Western tradition. She is the reason the cards look the way they look. She also died in poverty, mostly forgotten, in 1951.

You're allowed to be angry about that. We are.

The credit-erasure of Pamela Colman Smith, and why it still matters

Pamela Colman Smith, called Pixie by her friends, painted the deck between April and October of 1909, working under commission from A.E. Waite. She was paid a flat fee. No royalties. The deck went on to become the single most influential piece of occult illustration of the twentieth century. She received, by some accounts, the equivalent of a few hundred pounds for it. For decades, the deck was simply called the Rider-Waite, with her name dropped entirely.

The restoration of her name to the deck, now widely sold as Rider-Waite-Smith or simply Smith-Waite, was the work of decades of feminist scholarship. Stuart Kaplan, Mary K. Greer, and others did the archival labour of recovering her notebooks, her watercolours, her correspondence. The 2009 centenary editions of the deck were the first major commercial releases to give her name equal billing on the box. That was 2009. The deck is from 1909. The arithmetic on that gap is its own indictment.

She was a working artist before she was a tarot illustrator. She designed sets for theatre. She wrote and illustrated folk tales. She was, by every contemporary account, a vivid and slightly chaotic creative force, the kind of presence that does not survive being recorded by men who think she's mainly a vessel for someone else's system. The cards are not Waite's. The cards are hers, executed within the framework he sketched. Anyone who has looked at her independent illustration work can see her hand in every figure on every card.

If you've ever pulled a Rider-Waite-Smith card and felt something land, you've felt Pamela. The system is Waite's. The face of the system is Pixie's.

Lady Frieda Harris and the Thoth deck, an almost identical story

The other towering deck of the modern era is the Thoth, designed by Aleister Crowley and painted by Lady Frieda Harris between 1938 and 1943. Five years of painting. Eighty cards, including the four extra majors. She worked through the entire system in projective geometry, in egg tempera, returning again and again to revisions Crowley demanded.

The deck did not see publication until 1969, more than twenty years after Harris's death and Crowley's. The cards bear his name. Harris is, in much of the surviving popular literature, treated as the illustrator-of-record rather than the co-creator she clearly was. Crowley himself was more generous than his audience has been. His Book of Thoth credits her substantially. The deck is structurally his system, but the visual language, the colour, the cross-cutting geometries that have made the Thoth one of the most studied decks of the last fifty years, those are Harris.

The pattern is hard to miss once you've seen it. The two foundational decks of modern Anglophone tarot were each painted, in full, by women who became footnotes to the men whose systems they rendered visible. Without those women, no one is reading from either deck today.

The scholars and writers who held the thread

If the decks themselves are women's work that got credit-erased, the scholarship that pulled tarot back from the cul-de-sac it had wandered into by the 1970s is even more clearly women's work, and is much less anonymous.

Mary K. Greer is the central figure here. Her 1984 book Tarot for Yourself reframed tarot as a tool for self-reflection rather than prediction, and quietly changed what a generation of working readers thought the practice was for. She is the reason, more than anyone else, that the reflective model of tarot exists as a recognisable lineage. She is also the historian who did the substantive recovery work on Pamela Colman Smith.

Rachel Pollack, who died in 2023, wrote Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, which remains the single most cited interpretive text on the Rider-Waite-Smith. She also designed the Shining Tribe deck, ran decades of teaching, and was open about being trans long before it was professionally safe. She is the reason a great many of us learned to read at the depth we read at. She is also a reminder that "women in tarot" has never been a flat category, and that the women in question include trans women, queer women, women of colour, immigrant women, and women whose practice came from outside the British and American occult establishments.

Eden Gray, Sallie Nichols, Angeles Arrien, Mary Hanson-Roberts, Pamela Eakins. The list of women whose books and decks built the readable, teachable practice that exists today is long, and most working readers can recite it on demand. Most clients, including most clients who buy multiple decks a year, can't name three of them. That gap is the one this piece is trying to close.

The curandera and bruja lineages that the Anglophone canon kept missing

The Anglo canon of tarot history tends to stop at the British Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, with maybe a polite nod to French occultism. That's a partial story. There is a much older, much less indexed lineage of women's divinatory practice across Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and the Iberian peninsula, in which cartomancy with playing cards and later with the Spanish-suited and tarot decks has been quietly carried by women for centuries.

The curandera lineages of Mexico, the espiritistas of Puerto Rico, the cigana tradition in Brazil, the Catalan and Andalusian card readers, these are matrilineal, mostly oral, and mostly invisible to the English-language histories that begin with the Marseille and end with Waite. Naming this is not a side note. It is a correction. Modern tarot, considered globally and not just through the British and American occult-revival lens, has always been mostly women's work, and a great deal of it has been mostly women of colour's work.

If you read primarily in English, and primarily from authors who learned through the Golden Dawn line, you are receiving a partial map. The other parts of the map exist. They are being written down now, by women like Marisol Reyes and others, more and more in their own voices rather than through anthropologists' transcripts.

Contemporary women readers worth knowing in 2026

A list, because we said we would. None of these readers paid to be here. This is editorial.

Camelia Elias, scholar and reader, whose Marseille work has reanchored a lot of European readers in the older, image-first tradition. Lindsay Mack, whose podcast and teaching have shaped a generation of trauma-informed practitioners. Briana Saussy, on the storytelling and folk-magic side. Cristy C. Road, whose Next World Tarot has done what Pamela's deck did for an earlier era, which is give a generation an image system they can actually see themselves in. Hilary Parry Haggerty, who runs the Tarot Diploma program and has trained more working readers in the last decade than most of us realise. Marcella Kroll, on the Latina psychic and zine-tradition side. Bakara Wintner, who runs Everyday Magic in Asheville and writes plainly and well.

Inside the BookTarot directory, the women on our roster who have been doing this longest, by a margin we can verify, are Selene Vance, Marisol Reyes, and Cassian Mott (who is non-binary but came up through women's tarot lineage and asks to be counted in this history). They are not the only ones. They are the ones whose work shaped the editorial voice of this site. We owe them, and the long line of women behind them, our practice.

Pamela Colman Smith died in 1951, in Bude, Cornwall, alone, with her name not on the box of the deck she had painted. We are still correcting that. We will be correcting it for a while yet. Today is one of the days we do it on purpose.

The cards on your table were painted by a woman. Say her name out loud when you shuffle.