Imaginary Worlds - Queen of Tarot

Episode Date: January 23, 2020

When it comes to tarot cards, there is an artistry to designing a world of emperors, fools, priestesses, hermits and other iconic figures. But few people know about Pamela Colman Smith, the woman who illustrated the best selling deck of all time. Professor Elizabeth Foley O’Connor and author Susan Wands explain why Pamela Colman Smith was uniquely suited to design tarot cards that stimulate our intuition and our imagination – and how figures on the Rider-Waite (a.k.a. Smith-Waite) deck are based on a real troupe of famous actors, including Bram Stoker.  Here's the link to Susan Wands' novel about Pamela Colman Smith: https://www.amazon.com/Magician-Fool-Susan-Wands/dp/1999764676 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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And as I do that, I ask you to let go of looking for answers and just ask for guidance. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Okay. This is the Hermit. So this means that the work and the place that you come from has all been self-initiated, is that you build your world according to your own ideas of how the world should be. That is Susan Wans. She's an author and a tarot card expert, although you'll hear her use the European pronunciation tarot.

Now, I had actually never had a tarot or tarot reading before. I was a little skeptical and nervous. Like on one hand, I didn't believe in it. On the other hand, I believed in it so much that I was actually worried she was going to tell me something horrible was about to happen to me. But actually, it was more like a therapy session with the cards doing the talking. So this card is the Five of Swords. doing the talking. So this card is the Five of Swords. And what this is, it's a woman in a boat with a small child and the driver of the boat is taking over. Now, sometimes this is seen as going over the river Styx and you're leaving your projects behind, but you're taking a new project

with you. But you're also taking the pain of what happened in the last situation with you as the sadder but wiser journey. Now, I did not meet with Susan to get a tarot card reading. It just happened at the end of the interview. I wanted to talk with her about the person who had designed those cards. Susan was using what is known as the Rider-Waite deck from 1909. Rider was the publisher. Waite was the name of the author. But a lot of tarot card experts prefer to call it the Smith Waite deck, paying homage to the woman who illustrated the cards, Pamela Coleman Smith. The Smith Waite deck is the most popular deck in the world. It's sold over 100 million copies.

I'm sure you've seen it in movies or TV shows whenever someone uses tarot cards. Although the deck was not a huge hit right away when it was released in the early 20th century. In fact, tarot cards did not widely catch on in the U.S. until the 1970s, and tarot cards have had a huge resurgence in just the last several years. But what sucked me into this world was a photograph that I saw of Pamela Coleman Smith. The picture is from 1912, just three years after she designed this deck. And it's a grainy black and white photo. But the woman in the photo looks shockingly modern.

She seems to be biracial. She's sitting sideways on a chair with her arms folded, looking directly at the camera with a very playful smile. I have never seen anybody smile like that in an old photograph. And it looks like she's wearing a theater costume with a ruffled blouse, beaded necklaces, and a feathered headscarf. It looks like somebody in our time took an iPhone picture, added an old-timey Instagram filter, took an iPhone picture, added an old-timey Instagram filter, and barely tried to conceal the fact that the picture was taken today and not over a hundred years ago. And when I see a picture like that,

of somebody who seems to be out of sync with her own time, I'm always dying to know what their story is. So who was Pamela Coleman Smith? And what clues did she leave about her own life hiding in plain sight within the tarot cards? That is just after the break. To appreciate the world that Pamela Coleman Smith designed within the tarot cards, we need to understand where she came from. Pamela grew up in Brooklyn.

She traveled a lot with her father, who had business in Jamaica and England, and she came from a distinguished family. Her grandfather was the first mayor of Brooklyn. Her father was an artist. Her mother was a writer. They were friends with literary icons like William Butler Yeats. But we don't know if they were her biological parents. There's a lot of mystery surrounding Coleman Smith's birth. Elizabeth Foley O'Connor is a professor at Washington College, and she's working on a biography of Pamela Coleman Smith. And she says at the time, people speculated that Pamela may have been adopted, or that one of her parents was not fully Caucasian, or she was the product of an affair.

Either way, white people looked at her and thought, you're not one of us. And what to me, as a scholar, is most interesting is the ways that contemporaries that she met viewed her. When Ellen Terry first met her, Ellen Terry was the Shakespearean actress, but she called her a Japanese toy to a friend in a letter. I found several published accounts of various people talking about Coleman Smith as black, as a witch,

a 1912 delineator article. It's actually a very positive account of her work, but it calls her a brown squirrel, a Chinese baby, and a radiant morning. And those were comments by people who were considered progressive at that time. You can imagine how the rest of society saw her. progressive at that time. You can imagine how the rest of society saw her. She was an outsider in other ways too. She had synesthesia, which is a neurological condition where people perceive colors through smells or sounds. It affects everybody differently. And she had visions that were like waking dreams when she listened to music. That's when she was most prolific in creating her artwork. And very different music had different, you know, had different tones and colors and associations. And she was very interested in tapping into the unconscious, right, until before people even

really were calling it the unconscious. Even her faith was unorthodox. Her parents were part of a religion called Swedenborgianism. Which is a wackadoodle religion. Susan Wands has an open mind about a lot of things, but... Their founder in the 1700s in Sweden believed he could astral travel from planets to planets and that there were different little beings on each planet that could speak, and some looked like cheese, and other people looked like rodents. I mean, it was a crazy religion. How do you see in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

Is that how he believed all that? I don't know. He very well could have designed it. So her parents went to this sort of church that was really out there. Then she, from the age of about seven to 15, lived in Jamaica with voodoo and all these great stories that she wrote in her first Anansi book. Anansi the spider is a beloved character from African and Caribbean folklore. Pamela wrote books of Anansi stories, did the illustrations. She also ran a feminist printing press, did the illustrations. She also ran a feminist printing press, was very active in the suffrage movement, and she attended art school, which was not common for women at that point. Today, we would call her an interdisciplinary artist who works in a lot of different mediums. But back then, she was baffling even to bohemians. For instance, one of her patrons,

the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, once had a gallery show for her. She showed up for a gallery talk dressed in her Jamaican West Indian garb. Rather than talking about her art, she started chanting Yeats's poems. She started singing West Indian songs and telling Anansi stories. And the New York socialites who came to this gallery event did not know what to make of her at all. They just rejected her. And that happened repeatedly. I think to her credit, she stood her ground and didn't really meld or conform her art to what was expected. But she did pay a pretty heavy price professionally, socially, artistically, financially for it. There was someone who had unshakable faith

in her, her dad. In 1899, Charles Smith brought his daughter to London to help promote her book and to try to get her work as an illustrator. And that's when she was introduced to a man who would change her life, Bram Stoker. Yes, the guy that wrote Dracula. Although he had actually just written Dracula. His main career was as the stage manager at the Lyceum Theatre in London. Pamela was fangirling out, not over Stoker, but the actors at the Lyceum. They were the stars of the day who filled up the gossip columns. And they did not dismiss Pamela as a groupie. They really liked her, asked her to join them on a tour of North America, and she designed their costumes and posters. And then at the age of 21, she was orphaned. Her father died suddenly.

Her mother had died pretty recently too. And she made a big decision. She would move to England and join the Lyceum Company. And the theater troupe welcomed her like an adopted family. Their leading man, Henry Irving, became like a father figure to her. The leading lady of the group, Ellen Terry, was like her surrogate mother. Ellen actually gave Pamela a nickname, Pixie, which Pamela embraced as her new persona. She was the fairy godmother in a way. Again, Susan Wans. But Ellen was also the superstar of her day. She was the highest paid actress in London at the time. And she was very bohemian.

You know, she had children out of wedlock. She was having this affair with Henry Irving. She was larger than life. And I think she wasn't afraid to live her life. There is another reason why Pamela was a good fit with the Lyceum troupe. They had their own alternate religion called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. And one of their leaders was Alistair Crowley, who was such an infamous occultist, he was known as the, quote, wickedest man in the world.

They were trying to explore the alchemy of magic. They were trying to see if they could become magicians and what could they affect in the worldemy of magic. They were trying to see if they could become magicians and what could they affect in the world with their magic. And this is literal believing in magic, right? Oh, yes. There was so much drama in the group. I mean, the Golden Dawn actually split into warring factions, but it was through them that Pamela was first introduced to tarot cards. that Pamela was first introduced to tarot cards. Now, tarot cards had started out in the 15th century. It was a parlor game for Italian aristocrats.

And it wasn't until they made their way to France where people started to use them for divine guidance. But they were not commonly used in the 20th century until one of the members of the Golden Dawn, Arthur Edward Waite, saw an exhibit on tarot cards and hired Pamela to design a deck. There was this exhibit at the British Museum of the Solibusca cards and the Marseille cards, and he wanted to do his own interpretation of the cards according to the Golden Dawn. Pamela was not thrilled with the assignment. She had six months to create 80 cards, and she complained to a friend that it was, quote,

a big job for very little cash. But she was intrigued by the concept of it, and she dove in. The deck is unmistakably her work in a lot of ways. I mean, first, there's her signature on every card, which is important because she never received official credit. Her initials P, C, and S are drawn in a Japanese woodblock style, which goes back to her art school training. But overall, the cards look just like her theater posters. The colors are primarily golden yellow, tangerine orange, and pale blue. The backgrounds are intricate and sort of an art nouveau style,

but they're flat, like a stage backdrop. And the main characters on the cards are the members of the Lyceum Theater. Like, if you look at the Emperor card, the Emperor is clearly Bram Stoker. Because he's got sort of that boxer hold to it. He was the theater manager, but he ran the Lyceum Theater.

And he ran, I mean, it was because of him and his connection to Pamela that Pamela ever had any contact or any employment with the Lyceum Theater or with the Golden Dawn. So in some ways, Bram, who was a lifelong friend, she illustrated his last book, The Lair of the White Worm, when he was not well. So they were lifelong friends. The character on the Fool card is the actor William Teres. friends. The character on the Fool card is the actor William Torres. A lot of people find exception, take exception to her Fool card because they find it very childlike. Instead of the Fool in other cards from the Renaissance were seen as a beggar and a madman, he's seen more as a troubadour. But that probably fit with how she saw William Torres. He was a leading man at the company,

who was stabbed to death by a fellow actor outside the theater. Another famous actress in the troupe, Florence Farr, is the priestess. Henry Irving is the magician. Edie Craig, the daughter of Ellen Terry, is the Queen of Wands. She is very much the Queen of Wands. You can see there's a little black cat sitting next to her, which they did have. She was Pamela's roommate for a while. She started the Pioneer Players.

She had an affair with Christopher St. John, who is known as Chris, and then another woman became part of their retinue. Then she went on to become notorious because she was one of the first women who had a menage a trois with two other women in London. And finally, there's Ellen Terry, Pamela's surrogate mother. Pamela was really fixated on Ellen Terry. She did hundreds of drawings of her in her lifetime. And Ellen is the only performer who plays many roles throughout the deck. Oh, Ellen Terry is everywhere. She's in several things. She's the empress. Here's Ellen Terry. It could be a poster. It looks so much like her. There's several things that Pamela drew of Ellen Terry that has almost

that same oval face, that same strawberry blonde hair. I mean, theater is ephemeral by nature, especially in that era before audio or visual recordings were widespread. So these stars are mostly forgotten today, but they live forever in the cards, playing roles in the lives of countless people who use the deck for readings. But the cast and crew of the Lyceum only appear in the Major Arcana, which are cards that have iconic figures like kings and queens. There's another set within the deck called the minor arcana, which is everyday people dealing with different scenarios that don't involve royalty. And this was very unusual to have a major and minor arcana in the same tarot card deck. She did create a universe. She understood archetypes.

She understood the effect of having a little child look up the death skeleton on a horse and the drama of that and the tension within that. Now, these are two-dimensional. There's no vanishing point. There's no fine art shading to it. But I think the reason they have become the best-selling Tarot deck of all time is because they are universal. In every country, there's a Cinderella story, there's a king or queen story, there's an exile story. And each

one of these cards tells the story of a society where you belong, there's a hierarchy, and there's a fall from grace. Yeah, there's kind of a generic in a way medieval sort of culture that everybody can relate to on kind of a deeper Jungian Joseph Campbell level. Right, and Jung himself was absolutely fanatical about this deck of cards. Was he? Oh, yes. He really believed that they should be used for therapy, and a lot of therapists do use them now as part of their process. But he went a step further, and Jung actually said that he thought the cards could be used for telling the future. Elizabeth O'Connor says Carl Jung was not the only famous person who was into the cards.

T.S. Eliot found this deck pretty early on and uses it, used it personally, evidently, but also references it in The Wasteland. You know, Madame Sosostris and her wicked pack of cards. references it in The Wasteland, you know, Madame Sosostris and her wicked pack of cards. And now there's, you know, hundreds if not thousands of different tarot decks, but that was not the case in the early 20th century. At the time, Pamela had no idea how important this tarot card deck would become. It was just one project she was working on with the support of the Lyceum Theater. She also didn't realize how much of her life was like a house of cards that could easily fall apart. The Lyceum Theater was drawing to a close.

Edie was trying to start her own repertory company, and there just wasn't a place for Pamela in it. You know, Sir Henry died. Ellen was getting on in years. The whole infrastructure of how Pamela was folded into their life pretty much collapsed. That's so interesting because so many times in my life, you come across a really creative group of people that are all vibing and they feel like a family. Right. And you forget, you don't realize how circumstantial this sort of temporary make your own family is.

And at the time, because they were the Lyceum Theater and they were famous and all these important famous people were coming through, it was sort of self-sustaining for a while. But when Sir Henry didn't ensure the scenery and it all burned up, then the Lyceum Theater's future was pretty much determined to be over. And it was bought by a syndicate and it was over a year and a half later. was pretty much determined to be over, and it was bought by a syndicate, and it was over a year and a half later. Times were changing in other ways. Pamela had always followed her instincts and landed on her feet.

But Elizabeth says after World War I, that was getting harder. After the war, there was again another kind of turn towards realism, which had really started at the beginning of the century. But she was more interested in imagined worlds. But the 1930s, as you know, was a period of depression, both in and growing war, especially in England and severe depression in the United States and people were not really interested in magical mystical otherworldly landscapes. Her illustrative work was not in demand and so she

decided to move to Cornwall and she did still continue to work while she was in Cornwall but the output slowed dramatically and increasingly she was in Cornwall, but the output slowed dramatically. And increasingly, she was in quite severe poverty. Shortly before she left Park Garland, she sent a letter to a former associate in New York kind of begging if there's any work. And she talks about how she doesn't really have any food and she has to kill her last chicken. In her final years, there was not a lot of creative output. And when she died in 1951, her death certificate labeled her a, quote, spinster of independent means.

But she did not die alone. She had been living with a woman named Nora Lake. That's another mystery around her life. We don't know a whole lot about her explicit sexuality. I can tell you that she never married nor had children. With Nora Lake, it is unclear. Nora, who was married, was her housekeeper in Park Garland. And then pretty early on, keeper in Park Garland. And then pretty early on, Nora's husband dies. From about 1920 to when Coleman Smith died in 1951, Lake and Coleman Smith lived together. I did find inscriptions that they had written to each other in books where they have pet names, one's Mole and one's Bear.

And it's very clear that there's a deep love there. Pamela Coleman Smith is often identified as a queer icon, although we don't know for sure. And Susan has just come to accept the fact that Pamela will always be an enigma. I'll tell you something. I went to her graveyard where she's buried in an unmarked grave. And we did this little ceremony to try to say, thank you, Pamela, you gave so much to the world. And I got all choked up because I had all these things to say to her. I'm writing a book about you. I want people to know who you are. And I couldn't get a vibe of who she was. And Rose, one of the wonderful psychics that was there part of it, she could see I was distressed. And I said,

I'm getting nothing back. I traveled all the way here to Boud Cornwall to talk with her. He's not talking with her. And I just want to tell her how important the cards were. And I never forget, she turned to me and she said, oh, the cards weren't that important to her. People were. I mean, it's appropriate that this person who searched for community throughout her life gave people an instrument to find guidance in their lives. I mean, I think she embodies the question of how to live your best life, how to live your most authentic life, when society is telling you to stick to the path of least resistance,

even though that path was never designed for you. One of the elements of Coleman Smith's persona and self, really not even her persona, of who she was, that she does manage to inflect into the deck is that creativity, that mischievousness, that space for people to explore various connections that they may not have previously seen. Because that was something that over and over and over again I have found in Coleman Smith's life.

She was constantly making connections between disparate worldviews, disparate mythologies, disparate things, and bringing them together into something that had residence for her. disparate things and bringing them together into something that had residence for her. I think she gives tools for people to begin to tap into things that they might not be aware of. That's what happened to me when Susan read my cards. I came out of there feeling more confident and peaceful than I had in days. Wow. All right, so that's your reading.

Did it strike home at all? Wow. Like shockingly. Yeah. Okay, great. Well, that is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Susan Wands. She wrote a fantasy novel about Pamela Coleman Smith called Magician and Fool. There's a link in the show notes. And special thanks to Elizabeth Foley O'Connor. Her biography of Pamela Coleman Smith is scheduled to come out later this year. And if you're curious to learn more about Bram Stoker, I did an episode in January 2016 about the inspiration for Dracula. Now, a lot of people think Dracula was based on the actor Henry Irving, but there is a theory that the real inspiration may have been Buffalo Bill Cody. That episode is called Dracula from Nebraska.

You might also like to check out an episode I did in the fall called Talking to the Dead, which is about spiritualism and the occult in the early 20th century. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emalinsky and imagine worlds pod i also put a slideshow of her tarot cards and that picture from 1912 on the imaginary worlds instagram feed if you really like the show please leave a review in itunes or wherever you get your podcasts or even a shout out on social media that always helps people discover the show but the best way to support Imaginary Worlds

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