The Rider Waite Tarot is the most popular and widely used tarot among beginners and professionals.

In 1909, artist Pamela Coleman Smith, under the direction of Arthur Edward Waite, created an innovative 78-card tarot deck that would come to be recognized as revolutionary. With descriptive pictures on the 56 Minor Arcana cards, the Rider- Waite deck digressed from the tradition of tarot deck used for centuries and set the standard for nearly every tarot deck published.

A.E Waite was a spiritual seeker and mystic who supported himself with freelance translation and writing. In 1889, under the pseudonym Grand Orient, he published A Handbook of Cartomancy, Fortune-Telling and Occult Divination, one of the first books in English on how to read tarot. His fascination with the occult scene drew him into membership in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, but his spirituality gradually evolved away from ceremonial magic and toward Christian mysticism.

Pamela Colman Smith was born in London to American parents and spent part of her childhood in Jamaica. She studied art at the Pratt Institute in New York then toured with an English theater company as a costume and set designer. She was also known for going into a trance and channeling drawings while listening to music, many years before the surrealists experimented with automatism in art.