FAME AND FORTUNE

You've probably never heard of the artist who illustrated the much loved Rider-Waite tarot deck, Pamela Colman Smith. Novelist Jill Dawson tells the story of her extraordinary life

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The first time I ever had my tarot cards read was almost 40 years ago, when I was 24.

The tarot reader had the usual black lace skirt and silver jewellery, and said her name was Sian, but I could call her the High Priestess of Clapham. It was 11 September 1986, and I was living in a squat in Hackney, trying to write poetry. I sought her out for the usual reason: despair over a relationship ending. Also, I secretly wondered if I was having a nervous breakdown.

Sian turned over the Tower (things falling apart) the Death card (endings, of course); the Hermit (a period on my own); the Devil (addicted to Bad Love); the Hierophant (a magical helper). “Not sure I trusted her interpretations,” I wrote back then. “I’m going to learn the tarot and read the cards for myself.” And, for the longest time, that’s what I did, teaching myself by turning over a card each day, using the Motherpeace deck designed by Karen Vogel and Vicki Noble, which was popular in the 1980s.

But the deck most people visualise when they think of tarot is the Rider-Waite deck: the yellow Moon gazing down at the dog and the wolf in the Moon card; Death as a skeleton astride a white horse; the Fool stepping off the precipice of a cliff, his little dog leaping beside him. Like many, I had never really thought about the artist who had drawn those images. The artist's name, it turned out, is Corinne Pamela Colman Smith. In her book Waking the Witch, Pam Grossman writes of Smith and her tarot: “It’s hard to say which is more galling: the paltry sum she received, or the repeated lack of credit for her designs.”