Photograph of Pamela Colman Smith from the October 1912 issue of The Craftsman magazine
In his 1907 volume Bohemia in London, author Arthur Ransome describes meeting Pamela Colman Smith (known to her friends as “Pixie”) at one of her tipsy artist’s salons:
She was dressed in an orange-coloured coat that hung loose over a green skirt,
with black tassels sewn all over the orange silk […]. She welcomed us with a little
shriek […]. It was obviously an affectation, and yet seemed just the right
manner of welcome from the strange little creature, “goddaughter of a witch
and sister to a fairy,” who uttered it.
Encounters with Colman Smith typically described her exoticism, her childlike ethereality, yet also a healthy vigour. Throughout her life, such descriptions were peppered with bewilderment regarding her age, ethnicity, and even sexuality. Colman Smith’s vast body of work is similarly confounding. She made herself at home in the varied roles of artist, occultist, poet, designer, suffragist, folklorist, editor, publisher, and miniature-theatre maker. Most notably, she is famed as the illustrator of the Rider Waite Smith tarot deck―the most widely used and easily recognisable deck in the world today.
Born in 1878 to Brooklynite parents living in London, Pamela travelled widely throughout her youth, including stints in Jamaica which would inspire her later career as a performer of Jamaican folklore (under the mysteriously far-flung pseudonym ‘Gelukiezanger’). Art and writing were in her maternal blood, and aged fifteen she went to study at New York’s Pratt Institute where, according to Elizabeth Foley O’Connor, she was “widely regarded as a child prodigy”. Indeed, she was prodigious in all senses of the word―both eerily impressive and otherworldly.
A move to London in 1900 was precipitated by her close friendship with the actress Ellen Terry. In a letter to her cousin with news of the move, Pamela practically yells “I am going home with Miss Terry?!!!!! Isant [sic] it lovely!!!!???!!!” Ellen ensured that Pamela quickly became embedded in London’s rambunctiously colourful bohemian scene. Surrounded by artists, writers, actors and musicians, much of her initial work was in the theatre. She gamely performed in crowd scenes during one of the Lyceum Theatre’s tours of the UK as well as adding costume and stage design to her oeuvre. W.B. Yeats was a welcome mentor and collaborator, offering advice and content when she launched The Green Sheaf in 1903―a magazine dedicated, somewhat characteristically, “to pleasure”.
Like many―if not most―of Pamela’s multifarious projects, the magazine was no commercial success. It seems that Pamela was a persistently enterprising but not entirely successful hustler. To supply The Green Sheaf with a stream of hand-colourists, she had set up a school for the purpose; it remains unknown as to whether any students actually enrolled. A sceptic might say that Pamela’s enigmatically engineered persona was the product of a mind scheming after finances and fashions. She certainly made a habit of playing around with ambiguities surrounding her identity and ethnicity―perhaps even exploiting notions that she might be, for example, Japanese, during a time when the East was very much in vogue. Those more attuned to the art world might instead recognise Pamela as a cannily theatrical polymath, resourcefully scrabbling around to make an independent living.
Pamela’s friendship with Yeats ultimately led towards her future renown as Arthur Waite’s collaborator on the Rider Waite Smith deck. In 1901, guided by Yeats, 23-year-old Pamela joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult society dedicated to the pursuit of metaphysical knowledge through ritual and scholarship. The Order was filled to the brim with experimental thinkers and creatives such as Florence Farr, and Pamela’s friend from the Lyceum, Bram Stoker (“Bramy Joker”). Never advancing beyond the second level of the Golden Dawn’s many initiatory stages, Pamela skirted the fringes. Nonetheless, her artistic skills caught the attention of Waite:
It seemed to some of us in the circle that there was a draughtswoman amongst
us who, under proper guidance, could produce a tarot with an appeal to the world
of art and a suggestion of the significance behind the Symbols.
In 1903 the Order splintered, with Waite’s Rectified Order of the Golden Dawn seeking to explore a purely Christian mysticism, described by academic Helen Farley as “torturous”. Pamela followed Waite (rather than Yeats, who also formed a new society), which is perhaps unsurprising given her later conversion to Catholicism. It was within this new configuration that Waite proposed the creation of a tarot deck. He credits Pamela with a certain naivety regarding occult symbolism, claiming that “the one thing she lacked was an interest in the meaning of it!” This dismissiveness of Pamela’s scholarly capacities is perhaps predictable given the place in society that female artists occupied at the time. Nevertheless, it’s possible that she enjoyed the Order for its pomp and ritual, not to mention the social aspect of the group―what could be more enticing to a young artist than a secret society comprising artists?
Famously stating that Waite’s tarot project was “a big job for very little cash!” (she adored an exclamation mark), Pamela’s turnaround was swift. She completed all 78 illustrations in just a few months for a flat fee, a sum sadly in keeping with her historically unacknowledged contribution to the deck. Whilst Waite focused his prescriptiveness on the symbolism of the tarot’s Major Arcana (the “trump” cards), it’s possible that he left the illustration of the Minor Arcana (the “pip” cards) to Pamela’s uninhibited imagination. Secrecy was paramount within the Golden Dawn, and it is perhaps for this reason that Pamela never publicly discussed the meanings behind her tarot illustrations. Nonetheless, in a 1908 article titled “Should the Art Student Think?”, she instructs budding artists in the way of creating and viewing art that applies equally well to tarot reading: “Use your wits, use your eyes. Perhaps you use your physical eyes too much and only see the mask. Find your eyes within, look for the door in the unknown country.”
We might, upon closer examination, note that the figures in Pamela’s tarot are often gender-ambiguous, reflecting the trend for short hair and masculine clothing common amongst her female friends at the time. Indeed, Pamela’s friends often served as informal models on whom she based her illustrations―we can recognise the face of a young, boldly sociable Ellen Terry in the outwardly oriented Queen of Wands. The androgynous figures of her tarot add a dose of heft to suggestions of Pamela’s queerness―she never married, had no children, and latterly spent 30 years with her companion Nora Lake. More than this, and regardless of her sexual orientation, the representation of gender neutrality points towards Pamela’s future involvement with the pre-war suffragist movement, for which she designed propaganda posters as part of the artists’ collective Suffrage Atelier. Her work for the movement is both astute and deeply witty―thoroughly undermining Waite’s sense of her as largely surface-oriented.
Nature, too, is always close at hand in the Rider Waite Smith deck―from the Empress’ lush garden and the robe of pomegranates, to the wild seas, mountains and creatures (both real and mythical) featured throughout the deck. Waite was fascinated by the Grail tradition, including Arthurian lore. This was a passion shared by Pamela. In youthful letters to her cousin she describes working on whimsical drawings of Merlin and Guinevere, and in 1899 visited Tintagel, the supposed site of Arthur’s conception.
Waite’s obsession with Christian mysticism is also widely apparent in the deck―from the Judgement card’s overt references to the Resurrection to The World card’s Four Living Creatures of Ezekiel. Enthralled as she was by ritual, representation, and ceremony, Pamela converted to Roman Catholicism in 1911. Whilst conversion to or from Christianity was not uncommon within occult circles, some of her more bohemian friends treated her fresh piousness with disdain, and many ties were weakened or severed due to the perceived loss of Pamela’s much lauded playfulness and verve. Following a stay with Pamela in 1913, Lily Yeats scathingly wrote that “she now has the dullest of friends, selected entirely because they are R.C., converts most of them, half-educated people, who want to see both eyes in a profile drawing.”
Pamela eventually used a familial bequest to sign a lease on a property at the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall. There she and Nora would become caretakers for a chapel, whilst also providing retreat space for the clergy. Her later years were ones of quiet service and creativity―perhaps the end of the journey for an avid spiritual seeker, someone who championed communal inspiration above the patriarchal traditions of marriage and family. Despite ongoing attempts to revive her artistic career, Pamela died without funds in 1951. Pilgrims, fellow seekers, and tarot enthusiasts from across the globe continue to search for her unmarked pauper’s grave; as notoriously problematic to pin down in death as she was in life.