Beneath Your Bed Podcast
Beneath Your Bed Podcast
The Pixie Behind the World's Best Known Tarot Deck
Chances are you’ve seen, or even own, a Rider-Waite tarot deck. But have you ever stopped to wonder about just who is behind the deck’s iconic artwork? Tonight we delve into the life and work of little-known artist Pamela Coleman Smith.
Chances are you've seen or even own a rider Waite tarot deck. But have you ever stopped to wonder about just who is behind the decks, iconic artwork tonight? We delve into the life and work of little known artist, Pamela Coleman Smith.
Speaker 2:Jen, how are you? I'm doing well. How are you,
Speaker 1:Jen? I'm doing good. I have some, I have some good news. Oh my gosh. What news do you have? Well, we discussed this a few weeks ago that I might be able to have someone who worked with Hadden Clark and corrections. If that he would be willing to be interviewed. I mean the serial killer. Oh yeah. Hadden Clark. The serial killer. Oh my God. Yeah, he actually, in the nineties, he had murdered, he had murdered a young woman and he had taken her clothes and he had dressed up at our clothes. And then also, I don't know if he was convicted or he was a suspect in the disappearance of a little girl. So I spoke to this person and I told him, I said, no pressure, but think about it. And I didn't hear back from him right away. And then I talked to him on Sunday and he said, he seemed very interested in doing, it said that he, that he would be a guest. And, but he can't disclose to eight years because of his job. Okay. But we don't have to disguise his voice or anything like that. No, I don't think so. I wouldn't even know. We know how to do that. So yeah. So amazing. So that will probably, well, it will be our first guest and we've talked about, you know, in the new year we said once we had a few episodes under our belts that we wanted to branch out and you know, once in a while, um, have, have people on the show. So this is amazing. I'm so excited. So yeah. To tease our, not our next episode, um, I guess it'll be out hopefully in January. That is great. So we're going to be talking about what's his last name again? Has this Hadden Clark Hadden Clark. And we're talking, we're going to be talking with somebody who worked with him in corrections. Yes. Wow. Wow. Good job of explaining that. No, no, no. I just, I was just making sure I understood, like we're not talking to Hadden Clark because I'm afraid that would be nightmare fuel. Yeah. That would be, it would be like, not be talking to him. It would be kind of like we were doing what Jason Moss did if people remember that episode. Yeah. And we wouldn't want to do that. You just need to watch a video of him. He's he's super creepy. Oh, how old of a guy is he? I would say that he's probably in his sixties now would be my guess. So he was what? A party. Yeah. And he, he does suffer from paranoid schizophrenia. Okay. So you spent really ill, but he's creepy as. Yeah. Nothing against mental illness. Um, well we're, we're equal opportunity. Exactly. Um, yeah, he, he sounds, well, it sounds like it'll be riveting. Like I I'm already thinking what kinds of questions, you know, I'm going to have to do a little research on this guy so that all knew what the heck I'm
Speaker 3:Talking about. So that's my good news. That's awesome. Well, I guess the only good news I have is that I have a drink in my hand, but I'm willing to, I'm willing to share that good news. So you remember, I don't know. It's been, uh, an episode or two ago. I was really looking forward to making this Apple drink and it turned out like it was literally undrinkable. It was kind of like drinking gasoline. So I, I valiantly tried for a couple of sips and then I'm like, I can't, I can't do this. And I had spent, I mean, I probably spent$75 at the liquor store buying the ingredients. So I was really off. So I decided to try to, um, to redeem myself by making a champagne cocktail. So I, I have some champagne on my glass and then I poured a little bit that Apple Brandy in and added a sugar cube and a couple of dashes of Angostura bitters. What are you drinking? I am having, it's very simple. I am having a Moscow mule and the reason why I decided to, to make a mule because my brother, I saw him tonight and he had brought me some ginger beer. Oh, okay. And so with a mule, I have, um, vodka and lime juice and with the ginger beer, that sounds so good. And for the vodka, I use this pepper infused vodka. Think they're really refreshing in between the lime juice and like the, you know, the spice. And actually I think that, that, um, black pepper vodka sounds really intriguing. That sounds really good. I'll have to give that a try. All right. So tonight, um, tonight I'm gonna be talking about taro cards and more than Terra cards are going to be talking about a really interesting woman. I think you're going to be fascinated by her. Her name is Pamela Coleman Smith. And, um, she designed along with Arthur, Edward, wait, she designed Porter probably arguably the best known taro cards on the market. So I'm going to tell her, you actually gave me those terror cards. And actually, do you have those at work or do you have them at home? I have them at home. Oh my gosh. I'm so excited about that because I have the same ones, except I think I gave you the smaller ones and then I have, they're just slightly bigger, but it's the same deck. And I got them actually last got around this time last year, I really wanting, been wanting to learn how to read taro, but I just haven't, which is a shame. I mean, we're in a pandemic. You would think that I would have found time to learn how to read Tara, what I haven't. So I was going to ask you, maybe we can kind of study together. Like, would you be into that? I would, I'm kind of afraid of Satan, but you are. Other than that, I don't think I'll give it my best. I don't think tarot cards are at all CTS, but I'm going to talk more about like what taro does and how people think of it. But I it's not like the Weegee board or anything, so I don't think you have anything to worry about. Okay. Then I'm in. Okay, excellent.
Speaker 1:So what I'm going to do, I'm going to start out just kind of talking
Speaker 3:About the origins of taro a little bit. Maybe I'll be able to ease your mind. So you don't think that the devil's going to take us if, if we read tarot cards and then I'm going to talk about Pamela Coleman Smith, but I'll start out with the taro taro cards, actually date from mid century Europe today. When we think of Terra cards, we think of telling your fortune or divining what's in the future. But back in the mid 15th century, people just use them as playing cards. I think they call them Terrell or something. Um, they seem to be really popular in Italy, but other places in Europe as well. Um, and it wasn't until the late 18th century that some of the decks began to be used for divination or fortunes. And really the whole, I guess, reason for being behind Terra cards is they're just a tool to kind of help the person who's reading them, get a sense of meaning and figure out like a sense of meaning or direction in their life. The person that's reading them, or I guess if you're reading your own, so you would be looking for your own, but let's say I'm reading them for you. We're trying to like interrupt. Like I'm interpreting the cards in the sense of like their meaning in your life. But I think you can do either, so you can read your own or you can, can have them read for you. I'm not, I just want to kind of put out a caveat that I'm not an expert on taro at all. I don't know a lot. I really want to know more. And I feel like when I got these cards and I got a book that went with them, actually that went with Rider-Waite deck, which I'm going to be talking about tonight. It's so complicated. Like every card has so much symbolism you could spend, you could literally spend your whole life studying tarot cards and still not know everything you've done it. Right. You've had yours read before. Right? Brian and I were first dating in Philadelphia. There was this line out on the street that said$5 reading by Ms. Tilly. We went in and I think I forgot what she did. I can't remember if she did cards or if she'd read our poem, we'll have to see if he remembers. But so we went in separately and I think she read each one for five bucks. This wasn't the night. It was like a bargain basement price. And she was like, she told me, she's like, sometimes you'll feel your man love you, love you. So then he, Brian goes in and no, she gets his reading. And so we go out and he's like, well, what'd she tell you? And I tell him and he's like, Oh my God. She said the same thing to me. So she literally exactly the same thing. I'm totally fascinated by it. And I would really like to go to a good terror reader, but I feel like it's kind of hard in that. Like how do you find somebody who's kind of the real deal? Because like I said, there's so much to know and it's really, I think at its heart, it's really about being able to tell a story and being able to be imaginative and inventive. And there may be some serendipity in the cards, you know, sometimes things come together and they make sense. So I'll talk more about that in a little bit too. But the deck that I'm going to be talking about tonight is known as the writer await DEC or the writer await Smith deck, which is really, it would be my preference just to call it the RWS deck, because that includes Smith's last name, the woman who did the artwork for the cards. And sometimes her name gets left out of it. Of course, because women always get left out. Writer is actually the publisher of the cards. Wait, was the guy who did all of the meaning kind of divided the cards, men. And then Smith is her last name in the writer, weight Smith deck. There are cups which represent water Pentacles, which represent earth ones, which represent fire and swords, which stand for air. So they correspond to the four elements and they mean more than just that they have that elemental thing going on too. And in every taro deck, there are 78 cards and each suit, each of those has 14 cards and 10 of them are numbered cards, you know, like in regular cards. So it goes from ACE all the way up to 10. So it goes from eight to 10 and they call these the PIP cards, PIP. And then there are also four face cards and they also call it the minor Arcana. And then there's another set of cards in the deck. And it's 21 cards, which includes a Trump suit and a single card known as the full and then this 22 cards that is called the major Arcana. So I guess there are 22 cards in that the other cards, the PIP cards, there are 56 in that. So the Trump suit, like they're kind of the main figures that kind of the main, I guess, themes and stuff of the Carter and the major Arcana. So I was mentioning before that, I think Tara was really about interpretation. And I think that every reader, probably even though like there's basic things to know about the cards, like you have to kind of learn what some of the symbols represent and all about how you interpret them. So if I do a spread of cards, I'm probably going to see them differently than you are, although you and I, we have a lot in common, so who knows, maybe Arthur, my interpretations would be similar, but you know, I think every reader brings something different to it. And there's this Italian writer it'll lo Calveno who said, this is his quote, the taro is a machine for constructing stories. And I thought that was a really good way of kind of thinking about what tarot does.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I basically had zero knowledge of terror, but you know, as we started to learn a little bit more, when you got the cards and we talked about them, this has been, what, when did you get them? Like a year or two
Speaker 3:Christmas? Yeah. It was like last Christmas. So almost a year ago.
Speaker 1:And um, it, it made more sense to me as we went along that yeah, it's, it's up to interpretation, you know, there's no hard and fast rule to it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Which is what I love the act of interpretation that you read a work of literature and yeah, you have to, you have to be true to what the, what is in the text. But within that, you know, you can have a million different interpretations. And the way I read that and respond to something is probably going to be really different than the way somebody else will read and respond to it. And I'm going to see stuff that you're not going to see and then vice versa. So I think the same is true of taro. It's just, it's like a text, even though it's just, it's just a card and there's so much on there to interpret. I just, that gets me so excited when I think about it.
Speaker 1:So cool. What I look at the design on those cards, it looks like, and mind you, I know absolutely nothing about art, but it looks like kind of Picasso ish. Yeah. Picasso.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's interesting. So I read this article online actually this afternoon, cause I was thinking a little bit more about how to explain, like what taro is. There is an article called tarot is story, all story by this woman named Rachel Paula, who is apparently like a really great tarot reader. And she said that what really fascinated her about taro when she first came across the cards for the first time was not the idea that they could predict things or tell a future, but she was just fascinated by the cards. And she said, this is her quote that each card seemed a frozen moment in a story. And so you're kind of entering like mid-story and you pick it up and you sort of jumped into the story and like, depending on like what the spread of cards is, one card may impact the meaning of another. And so she also said that tarot can be interpreted on different levels. So, you know, you can look at it from just kind of what's going on in your personal life to larger spiritual teachings. Oh, okay. Yeah. So I think it's kind of, again, it's kind of what you bring to it. And she says something else that really, that really struck me. And she said that it's not necessarily, she doesn't think of it as the cards having intrinsic, meaning it's not like it's more like what we bring to it through our interpretation and our interaction, which, which I think is cool, which is, I think that's a real reason why it would be so fun to do it.
Speaker 1:I've always had an interest I think, or maybe when I was younger, but I was always afraid of it because at that time, at that age, or even up until the last couple of years, I would think, watch me get the card of death. Like it was the worst thing in the world to get the card of death itself.
Speaker 3:Wouldn't you say that? Because he would ask me earlier tonight if anybody had ever read my taro. And I said, no, but I had totally forgotten until you just said that in college, there was a sky my freshman year named Rodney. And I remember being in the dorm in the boys dorm and he had a deck of tarot cards. And I remember, I remember being afraid of the very same cause when he explains what are some of the cards I was afraid that were coming. And he kind of said, well, if that comes up, it doesn't mean death. You know, it means, I forget what he said,
Speaker 1:Well, not to be sexist. I mean, we've talked about this before with seances and Weegee boards that usually it's kind of like a girl thing. I get really into that sort of thing. So I knew he was gay. So I don't know if that, you know, you might have some gay people that would really take offense to that, but I get, you know what I mean? But that's okay. I'm just teasing you. All right. So now I'm going to talk,
Speaker 3:I'm going to tell you a little bit about Pamela Coleman Smith. And I think you already know a little bit about her because you are a wonderful daughter, gave me a book last Christmas called Pamela Coleman Smith. The untold story. So Pamela Coleman Smith was born in 1878 and she was born in London, two American parents. And both of her parents were from prominent New York families. It's important to know that in 1889. So when she was about 11 years old, the family moved to Jamaica because her dad took a job there in while she was in Jamaica, she was really, really taken with the folklore and just absorbed all of this Jamaican folklore. And that would impact her for the rest of her life. She was known as a storyteller as well as being an artist. Um, she did a lot of cool stuff in her life, but she would tell these dude like these one woman shows for her friends and perform these Jamaican folk tales and stuff. And she had said later that she really learned like what a story was and how to tell a story. Even in her art, from the tales that she heard when she was in Jamaica,
Speaker 1:How old was she? When she moved there? She was only 11.
Speaker 3:And actually she only stayed there until she was 15, but they were very formative years, I guess, for her it was something that, that really stuck with her. So when she was 15, she moved to Brooklyn, New York because she was accepted at the Pratt Institute, which was a leading art school. And she stayed there for four years. She left in 1897. She didn't actually earn a degree. I'm not exactly sure what happened and why that was. But she went on to work as an illustrator after she left school. And she was kind of back and forth. She spent a lot of time in England, but she was also in New York for awhile, but she did a lot of design for the theater. And one thing she did, and there were pictures of this in the book. She even created this miniature theater and would have like these plays in her miniature theater. And she would design all of the sets and come up with all of the characters. And she had a lot of, a lot of friends who are actresses, including the actress, Ellen, Terry, I don't know if that name rings a bell for you. She was famously the mistress of Charles Dickens. And I'm just thinking, as I say that hell terrible. The like the thing that I knew Ellen Terry for was who she was basically. And not like who she is in her own. Right. I'm ashamed of myself and ashamed of history for that, but they were good friends and it was actually Ellen Terry who gave him the nickname pixie. So snip also known as pixie did a lot of things in her life other than taro, but it's taro that she's best remembered for, but I want to spend some time just talking a little bit about some of the other stuff she did. Cause it was so cool. So she actually illustrated Bram Stoker's final novel, which was the layer of the white worm. Really? Yeah, she did. Um, there were some pictures of that in the book as well. And she illustrated a book of poetry by WB eights and she designed posters for the women's suffrage movement. She was part of this thing called the suffrage[inaudible], which was a collector or a collective of female illustrators who did art promoting, promoting women's suffrage. And then, I mean, she was really creative for her whole life. So she, there was never a time when she wasn't working. And I read that she really worked up almost to the time that she died. But at one point she had her own printing press. She called it the green sheet press. She used it to publish and promote the work of other women, artists and writers. And that lasted for a couple of years, really before her time, she really was like, it was, I was reading about her. I'm like, yes, she would have been our friend. We would have like, and she was very into like women's community really into just promoting women's women's art women's wear. I didn't read anything. So there's no mention she was never married. She never had children. And there was no mention of her having like relationships, intimate relationships with women either. But I did read something, something on the web, in the writer. I can't remember. I can't remember where I saw this, but the writer kind of said, think kind of looking between the lines. She was probably lesbian, but we just don't know that for a fact. No, we don't know. They did mention a good friend of hers. My thought, well maybe there could have been something there because they lived together for a while before we hopped on tonight, I was reading about her. And I read that again. Like you said, reading between the, she was probably gay,
Speaker 1:But she had the same companion for 30 years. And was that Nora? I think Nora, somebody, I don't remember the person's name, but so that she had a two is believed to be her partner or life partner. And they had been together for like 30 years or something or over 30.
Speaker 3:I mean, regardless of what's what is, or isn't going on in the bedroom? That's a true partnership. Like that's, that's a relationship in any term,
Speaker 1:Right? Like they lived together, right? Or was it not?
Speaker 3:Hi, I'm actually they, so they ran a house for a vacation home for priests for awhile. If we're thinking of the companion and I have her name here somewhere, her name was Nora Lake. And she was described as her longtime friend. So yeah, they, they ran a vacation home for priests in Cornwall.
Speaker 1:It's probably the same person and that's one of the things that I came across.
Speaker 3:So one really impressive thing that happened in 1907, the famous photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, which you may know him better as the lover of Georgia O'Keeffe, which makes me happy. Cause we can, we can sort of make it sound like all Alfred didn't live with beat Georgia O'Keeffe's lovers. But anyway, he gave an exhibition of her paintings in his gallery. And I think she was the only woman's work that he exhibited there. And he said he admired her synesthetic sensibility. And she had this. She, if you ever heard of synesthesia, no, it's this thing where like one sense sort of stands in for the other. So it would be like if I was able to smell a painting or I'm able to like see music. So it's where like your senses kind of get crossed and people believe like looking back that she probably had synesthesia because she did something which we'll talk about in the end. But she, she did these musical paintings that were really interesting. So how she ended up being involved with tarot cards, which like I said, is the thing she's, she's most known for in 1901, she joined the hermetic order of the golden Dawn and that was an esoteric society. And they were devoted to the practice of magic cultism religious studies and mysticism and Yates was part of that. He was part of that. And then it later broke into two factions. There was like one that was more focused on myth and kind of the esoteric. And then the other faction, more focused on Judeo-Christian, um, origins, like including like our theory and stuff on the legend of King Arthur and all of that.
Speaker 1:It's funny that we're talking about this because my brother last night when we were hanging out together and he brought up that hermetic order and I'm looking at, do you know about all this? Yeah. And then I remembered Masonic symbolism and my brother's a Freemason. Oh my gosh. That's so interesting. And I think that's
Speaker 3:Masonic stuff that goes back. God, that goes back so far.
Speaker 1:It does. I still want us to try to, to join the Freemasons down here. We should do it. Oh, we shouldn't do it. I haven't don't have any qualms at all.
Speaker 3:It's some weird. Actually this was some weird to the hermetic order of the golden Dawn, but I think it would have been super fun to be part of it. So she actually went, there was something in London called the ISIS Urania temple of the golden Dawn. So she went there, there are all these different levels of membership. And I think she only made it up to like the second level of membership, but she did meet this guy named Arthur, Edward wait there. And it was he, um, that commissioned her in 1909 to create the taro deck. So in terms of, of Smith's life, sadly her work found little commercial success, especially after world war one. I was talking to my husband about this cause he's, uh, teaches English and he wanted his areas is like the literature of the early 20th century, you know, modern world war. And I was like, you know, why, why was world war one? Like, it, it seems like there was this dividing line before the war and after the war, everything that was braced is high art. Like after the war, it was just like kind of torn down. And I think it's because the war was like, it was just, it was such a cataclysmic, an awful event get kind of just sucked all the meaning out of life. And so it's like artists kind of had to start from the beginning, like trying to create meaning again. So anyway, Smith, she struggled financially really for just about her whole life. But I tended to get the sense that like, it was a bad life for her. I got the sense that she was always fulfilled artistically, even though she didn't have a lot of money. And I mentioned that for a time, she ran that vacation home for priests or companion or her friend. And uh, you know, she just surrounded herself with a company of women really for her whole life. She died in 1951 in Cornwall, in a place called, I don't know if I'm going to pronounce this correctly. It looks like booed B U D E and her grave. This was really sad to me. Her grave site is unknown and it said she was likely buried in a Popper's grave. She is thought to be in, in Cornwall. And they, they did say a name of a cemetery where she likely is, but nobody knows like where in the cemetery she is. And actually after her death, all of her belongings were auctioned off to pay off her debts. Didn't she convert to Catholicism. She did. And I can't believe I neglected to mention that. I think she converted really early in her life, like 1911. So she was what about 30, 30, one 32 at that time. And I got a sense that Catholicism, like it gave her like a solid foundation. She was buffeted by financial insecurity and all of this, but she felt like very rooted in her, I guess, in her faith and Catholicism filled with like ritual and exactly. And I think that was maybe a big part of why she was so drawn to it, appealing to her. Exactly. She was really, she was a fascinating woman because she knows she didn't fulfill those typical roles that women did. Like she didn't marry and have kids. And she was kind of uncategorizable people talked about how she was even hard to just categorize physically. Like sometimes she was mistaken for being Japanese or African-American, but like, she seemed to like kind of straddle, like some gender. Like she, again, she didn't fulfill that typical female role. Class-wise like, she kind of ran with a lot of like upper crusty people, but she herself wealthy, even, even though she came from money. So I'm not sure really what happened to the family money and all of that Arthur ransom who did a lot of illustration of fairytales. I've seen some of his stuff, but he referred to her, he described her as a strange little creature. And he said that when they were talking one time, she described herself as, and this is what she said, a God daughter of a witch and his sister to a yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like super,
Speaker 3:Super cool. It seems like pixie was the perfect name for her. So anyway, I guess Arthur, wait, he got his idea for making a new taro deck. He came across some older call manuscripts apparently. And I don't know, I don't know what those manuscripts were, but I was curious about maybe what he saw. So it seemed like they worked really well together. Like they were a good artistic team and weight was responsible for coming up with the major concepts and the structure of the cards and kind of their overall symbolic there's symbolic meanings. And it's interesting because I guess traditionally in like most other tarot decks, the number cards are not very detailed, but in the rider Waite Smith deck, they're extremely detailed. So they're, they're really, as much of an interpretive card is like all the major Arcana cards. And I got the impression that before that deck like that wasn't true. So that was one of the, that was one of the major changes. And one of the major contributions that they made to taro Wade apparently regarded, uh, Smith as having psychic abilities, which was one of the reasons that he wanted to work with her. I think that might've been a little bit linked to her synesthesia too. And the deck is based on, um, Judeo-Christian mysteries rather than a cult magic. So see, that's another reason you don't have to worry about the devil. I know, I know we can, we can relieve. So wait said that the Trump cards or the major Arconic were related to Western Christian mysticism, especially the Arthurian legend of the Holy grail. And interestingly, I was reading that the grail quest was also something that was associated with women's suffrage because women were questing and they were on this, on this quest for political, social, spiritual equality. So there are all these layers to everything I never would have guessed that I know I wouldn't have either.
Speaker 1:And also all these people to be that run in the same circles like Stoker and eights and Coleman and actresses and actors during that time that were associated with that hermetic order. Yes.
Speaker 3:It really captured my imagination too. There was just this Renaissance of, of thought so much was changing socially. Like people were kind of sloughing off Victorianism and you know, it was more like thinking more in terms of opening up to new ideas. I think if I could pick any time to live, I think it would between like 1895 and 1913.
Speaker 1:I don't know if I would want to, um, where you like all the Victorian age, what is your fascination with that?
Speaker 3:I've just always been drawn to that time, but I don't, I think I would have wanted to kind of going into the Edwardian era because it was hard to be a Victorian woman. I probably would've ended up as a scholar remade or something, or like Jack, the ripper victim I would have wanted, I would've liked to have lived a life like Coleman Smith. Is she just, she was part of all these things going around her. Like she had friends in these places and she was working on these things and the world was changing and she was part of it. I just think she was not your typical, like I think living, living her life would have been incredible. And I would have gotten to wear like a corset and crinolines, all those things. Exactly. So wait, who did the structure of the cards? And every card had a surface meaning and a meaning that couldn't really be captured in words, it was almost that intuitive sense. There's this cool quote from Smith where she's talking about how you should interpret art. And she says, use your wits, use your eyes. Perhaps you use your physical eyes too much and only are the mask find eyes within. Look for the door, into the unknown country. Someone's giving instructions for how you should interpret taro to right use your inner eye. The other cool thing about her cards is that she uses a lot of androgynous figures in gender role reversals. For example, the, the full card has that going on. She would sometimes copy not copy, but she would use her friends, some of her artists and actors, friends as models. If you look at the cards, there's one that looks like Ellen, Terry, I think it's the queen of the wands looks like Ellen. Terry people think it was modeled after her. And then there was Ellen Ellen Terry's daughter. I can't remember her name right off the top of my head, but there's another card that looked like her. And she was, I think, a pretty well-known lesbian herself, not Ellen Terry brewing daughter. Her name was Edith something eat at the Craig, I think. And there's a sense that, you know, I talked before about how, how Smith's like when she spent those years in Jamaica as a young girl, she learned how to tell a story. And there's a sense, I think, in, in her cards that she's, she's telling a story in her card. When you look at them, it's kind of like, you stumbled into something that's already happening, which makes total sense when you think about interpretation, because it's not like it's just a fixed kind of image. It's like there's stuff going on and you kind of have to fill in the gaps. I wonder how those cars became the most popular cards. That's that's a good question. Uh, her name doesn't come up. I mean, I studied a lot of modernist literature when I was in grad school, but it's weird that like she did all this work, but she's the reason we, we know her. If we know her is because of these taro cards. It's just the craziest thing it is you think like, because it was this, so Ryder was a publisher. I think of maybe the writer that company published the first edition or what, but it was eventually picked up by like USA games and something. I think that's, and there, the publisher of that book I was telling you about by Stuart Kaplan, gimme you think about how many taro cards were sold, how many Rider-Waite Smith decks are sold every year? Like the woman would have been so wealthy. Has she lived in age? Yeah. It's just so sad that she died with no money
Speaker 1:In an unmarked grave. Exactly. I knew what I was going to mention
Speaker 3:On her death certificate. It was put Spencer
Speaker 1:Independent means. Wow, wow.
Speaker 3:Of that as amazing. So I think unless you had a, really like a socially advanced man and you were straight marriage just would have been insufferable, I think much better to be a spinster of independent means if you, I
Speaker 1:Am of the belief that she was probably lesbian.
Speaker 3:I got that strong feeling as well. I think like if you, especially, if you think of like lesbian, like whether, whether that means sex or not, like she just like the relationships that matter to her, what relationships with women, women didn't sound like she had any meaningful relation. I mean, she had that artistic partnership with Arthur, Edward wait, but primary relationships were female relationships.
Speaker 1:She and her partner, they, they ran basically the equivalent of, um, a gay BNB for priests or priests. It's not great.
Speaker 3:That is so great. Oh my God. I'd like to go to that little village in Cornwall. I mean, just to see where she lived and you know, London's another place I want to go. And I don't know if, if that place, um, you know, where the ISIS Uranian temple is. I don't know. Like if you could track down like what part of the city that was in and yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you remember, or this might've been just a few years before your time, but there was, um, superhero, miss, not a cartoon, but a show. And it was based on ISIS. No, I don't think it was a big hit, but I made quite the impression on me and this woman, she would turn into ISIS. There would be these imagery, the Gazelles running, and it's ridiculous.
Speaker 3:We didn't see that. So with that, I'm in like the seventies or the eighties
Speaker 1:And the name of the series was the secrets of ISIS. That's crazy.
Speaker 3:It's like wonder woman in some ways, because that's so crazy that you remember that you were hilarious.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That really jumped out at me. I was like really into it at the time he must've been, he must've been in
Speaker 3:Consolable after it. Didn't after it didn't come back
Speaker 1:For it only to be on for a year. I sure do. Remember. I remember it really well and like wonder woman, you know, that was on forever. That's really interesting. Maybe I'll do an episode on that shed, although maybe it'll be a different kind of episode. I just want to do that one alone, an adult, an adult.
Speaker 3:So nature. And um, the four elements were, they were a prominent feature in a lot of her work. She also did some paintings that are called visionary paintings, which I'll end with here in a minute, but a couple more things about the taro. So, um, in her lifetime Smith never discussed what her cards might mean. So there's, there's one last little story I just want to leave you with. So we kind of finished up the tarot cards, but I mentioned she also did a lot of paintings and she did these visionary paintings. Um, and she had her first vision on Christmas day in 1900 while she was at her good friend, Ellen Terry's house. And she was there and they were listening to Bach and she just had this mystical experience and she described something like a shutter clicking. And then she said she was able to see through the small aperture. It sounds like a camera, the way she describes it inside of her head. And she described what she saw, and this is what she said. She saw dancing and frolicking, little elephant people with the wind blowing through their hair and a billowing, their dresses, not like something I would see. I'm like, I am feeling this sister when she said that after that point, she would go on to attend different classical concerts. And in a single concert, she might make as many as 30 drawings during a performance, she just sit there like sketching the whole time. That's amazing. You know, later she would, I guess she would refine them and turn them into paintings. And she had to draw really fast because when the music ended, she, her visions ended. So in her, one of her friends was WC in the famous French composer. And he said that her paintings were quote, his dreams made visible, which I really loved. But the last thing I want to end on just struck me as so funny. So the German composer, Wagner, she said that when she listened to Wagner, she didn't see anything. She really hated what she said. She said, when I listened to Wagner, I feel so full of rage that I want to crack the heads of people together, like nuts. Oh my God hated Wagner. And she was like, she didn't do any drawings of his music as this always kind of described as being very heavy and like ponderous. And I just think she's fascinating. Like she did her own thing. She was
Speaker 2:March to the beat of her own drummer. And you know, she's left at his leftist, these amazing cards that are probably in so many people's houses and they don't even know. They don't even know who she is. So, yeah. So I think we should toast to her. She was quite the woman. I'm like quite enamored of her, right. To be on the law to pixie. Pamela, thank you to everyone who listens. The best thing you can do to help us grow is to like review on subscribe on iTunes and even better yet tweet about us or post about us on Facebook. Tell your friends if you think they would like us and have a good night.[inaudible].