this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2026
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Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
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Tarot existed for ages before the Rider-Waite deck. In fact, the common playing cards descended from tarot.
Plus, there are multiple popular-ish decks from about the same time, owing to the boom of occultism in the couple decades around 1900. The Aleister Crowley deck is a famous one that's different from Rider-Waite.
ok. It's kinda why I chose "canonical" instead of "first". As in, the ones people "reading fortunes" are using.
Ehhh, I think people are mostly kinda aware of the existence of the various tarot decks. I'd say rather that the Marseilles tarot is the major precursor to them all, having influenced both the playing cards and the Rider-Waite art.
ok, now this is the discussion that's worthwhile. What word would you say the Rider-Waite deck represents? I feel that since it's the one that Aleister Crowley is involved with, it feels like the point of reference for using the tarot deck for the occult instead of historical game playing reasons, which many sources use as a point of inspiration and reference?
What word would you use for Marseilles tarot and the Rider-Waite in these contexts?
Well, Rider-Waite is definitely the most popular one among people getting a deck as some new-agey tsatske (myself included). I'm just not sure that proper esotericists stick with it, when different designs also have different symbolism. E.g. Alejandro Jodorowsky, who used tarot as both symbols in his films and for some weird psychotherapy, has his own deck design.
Though, come to think of it, you're right in that even most redesigns are based on Rider-Waite, just adding some modern graphics or whatnot. I guess the Marseilles deck is rather ‘prototypical’, since no one probably uses it unchanged.
To clarify, Crowley wasn't involved with the Rider-Waite deck, to my knowledge — although at some time he was in the same Order of the Golden Dawn in which both mystic A. E. Waite and illustrator Pamela Colman Smith were members (and which influenced Crowley's Thelema). The Rider-Waite deck definitely incorporates occult symbolism, and considering that the Order of the Golden Dawn was pretty influential in the movement, I'd guess that the imagery still holds — haven't researched it in detail.
Crowley had designed his own deck, called Thoth Tarot, about thirty years later. It uses different symbolism and even rearranges some stuff like the trump cards and their alphanumeric correspondence. Alas, it's very busy graphically compared to Rider-Waite.