Art and Design Commons^™

Seeing Is Believing: Observing Trans Spirituality Through The Smith-Waite Tarot, Phoebe Santalla

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

In 1909 the Rider Company published the Smith-Waite Tarot deck which featured 78 illustrated cards by Pamela Colman Smith. With heavy use of appropriated and ambiguous symbology, the Smith-Waite deck became a meditation tool for realizing alternative realities. By observing the history of the deck, analyzing Smith’s approach to illustration, and retracing the counterculture occult explosion in the 1970s, this essay argues that the Smith-Waite deck is an object the reflects the queered body and self. The modern, trans-contentious, Western political climate creates an environment that obscures the fact that transgender people exist beyond the medicalization of their bodies. To …