Tarot Systems and Decks, Compared

Tarot didn't arrive as a finished system. It grew through centuries of use, reinvention, and argument. The cards began as a 15th-century Italian card game, accumulated esoteric meaning gradually, and were eventually seized upon by occultists who each built their own symbolic architecture on top of the inherited structure. The result is that today's three major traditions share a common skeleton—78 cards, four suits, 22 trump cards—but differ substantially in imagery, card names, and interpretive approach. Choosing a deck isn't just an aesthetic decision; it's choosing a lens.

This is the deck most people mean when they say 'tarot.' Published in 1909, it was designed by artist Pamela Colman Smith under the direction of occultist Arthur Edward Waite, both members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Waite later left to found his own Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, and his deck reflects a Christian-mystical, Kabbalistic worldview—though he deliberately concealed and partially modified the Golden Dawn's internal correspondences, out of his oath of secrecy.

Smith's illustrations are art-nouveau in spirit: richly detailed, narrative, and full of symbolic gesture. The most important innovation is that every single card—including the numbered Minor Arcana pip cards—shows a full scene with figures. The Five of Cups shows a cloaked figure lamenting spilled cups; the Eight of Wands shows wands arcing through open sky. This was genuinely new. Older traditions had used only geometric arrangements of suit symbols for the pip cards, the way a standard playing card deck still does.

This illustrated-pip approach made RWS decks dramatically more accessible. A reader can look at the Two of Pentacles and see a juggler balancing two coins amid ocean waves, and immediately read something from that without knowing any formal system. This is one reason RWS became the global default and why the vast majority of modern decks are RWS-derived or RWS-compatible.

Aleister Crowley and painter Lady Frieda Harris produced the Thoth deck as an explicitly Thelemic magical system—Thelema being the religious-philosophical framework Crowley developed from his 1904 work The Book of the Law. The deck is Kabbalistic and Egyptian-Hermetic in its symbolism, and Crowley used it to publicly rebuild some Golden Dawn correspondences that Waite had obscured.

Notably, Crowley reassigned the Hebrew letter Tzaddi: in Waite's arrangement it corresponds to The Star; Crowley moved it to The Emperor, based on a line in The Book of the Law. He also renamed several Major Arcana cards to better reflect their Thelemic meanings: Strength becomes Lust, Justice becomes Adjustment, Temperance becomes Art, Judgement becomes The Aeon, and The World becomes The Universe.

Harris's paintings are art-deco and built around projective geometry—a mathematical system she studied intensively. The cards are dense, layered, and often feel like diagrams of invisible forces rather than human stories. The pip cards are illustrated, but with abstract symbolic geometry rather than narrative scenes.

Crowley's companion text, The Book of Thoth (1944), is intentionally demanding—part magical treatise, part mythopoetic theology, touching on astrology, alchemy, Kabbalah, and Egyptian symbolism. He described the book itself as a kind of magical operation. Reading Thoth well typically requires more background knowledge than RWS, but practitioners find it correspondingly richer for that investment.

The Tarot de Marseille (or TdM) is the oldest of the three living traditions, representing the woodcut-printed decks that were standardized in southern France by the 17th and 18th centuries. It is less overtly esoteric than either Waite or Crowley—it predates the systematic occult overlay that came with 18th-century French occultists like Antoine Court de Gébelin and later the Golden Dawn.

The most immediately striking difference for anyone used to RWS: the pip cards in TdM are non-illustrated. The Five of Cups is simply five cups arranged on the card, geometrically. There are no weeping figures, no narrative. This is not a limitation so much as a different methodology: TdM reading focuses on structure—number, suit, position, and the relationship between adjacent cards in a spread. Modern Marseille readers often read the images through careful attention to visual details in the trumps and court cards: which direction a figure's eyes are looking, what a hand gesture implies, how two cards 'speak' to each other when placed side by side.

Historically, the TdM is closer to how tarot was actually used before the 19th-century esoteric revival. Scholars like Robert M. Place have traced tarot's origins carefully through its Italian Renaissance roots, and the TdM sits closer to that lineage than to the Golden Dawn reconstruction.

Feature	Rider-Waite-Smith	Thoth	Tarot de Marseille
Pip cards	Illustrated scenes	Geometric-symbolic	Suit symbols only
Art style	Art nouveau, narrative	Art deco, projective geometry	Woodcut, hand-colored
Esoteric framework	Christian-Kabbalistic (Golden Dawn)	Thelemic, Egyptian-Hermetic	Minimal formal esotericism
Key renamed cards	Standard names	Lust, Adjustment, Art, The Aeon, The Universe	Largely standard, some regional variation
Reading method	Intuitive narrative from imagery	Formal symbolic system	Structure, number, visual gesture
Best for beginners?	Yes	Challenging	Moderate

This table simplifies; within each tradition there are many deck variants, schools of practice, and arguments. But it captures the main fault lines.

There is no objectively correct answer, but there are useful questions to ask yourself.

If you want to read intuitively—to look at a card and let the picture tell you something without having to memorize a system first—the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition is the most welcoming entry point. The illustrated pips do a lot of the work for you, and there are more learning resources keyed to RWS than to any other system.

If you're drawn to a more rigorous or ceremonial approach, and you're interested in Kabbalah, astrology, or alchemy as parallel studies, the Thoth deck rewards that kind of commitment. Don't expect to pick it up casually; expect a long acquaintance.

If you're interested in tarot's older history, or if you find narrative imagery a distraction rather than a help—if you want to develop an internal system of number and element rather than rely on illustrated suggestion—the Tarot de Marseille offers a stripped-back, structurally elegant approach.

Many experienced readers eventually work with more than one system, using different decks for different kinds of questions or different moods.

Each tradition has a foundational text worth knowing, even if you read it skeptically.

Arthur Edward Waite's The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) is the companion to the RWS deck. It provides upright and reversed meanings for every card, along with notes on symbolism. Waite is famously guarded—he withholds some Golden Dawn material deliberately—but the book remains the bedrock of RWS interpretation and is in the public domain.

Aleister Crowley's The Book of Thoth (1944) is the companion to the Thoth deck. It is dense, erudite, and rewarding in proportion to what you bring to it. Crowley situates the deck within an elaborate symbolic cosmos; the book is as much a Thelemic document as an interpretive guide.

Robert M. Place's The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination (2005) isn't tied to a single tradition but provides perhaps the most rigorous historical account of how tarot developed from its Italian Renaissance origins to the present day. Place is both a tarot artist and a careful historian, and the book balances scholarship with practical insight.