Reading in memory of Pamela Colman Smith

It is Pamela Colman Smith’s birthday today. Colman Smith was the artist behind the Tarot deck many of us began with - the Rider Waite Smith deck.

As the day passes into evening I thought I would ask her, through the Tarot of the Sephiroth, how she would like to be remembered. I thought she would see no incongruity in this, as it was her work which opened the doors to the production of many different Tarot decks. I have only had this deck for a week or so and am a real novice with it but what the heck?

Tarot of the Sephiroth maps the creative process in the Tree of Life, the matrix of human consciousness explicit in Qabalah. I won’t go into this here as I barely understand it myself and it will take 50 years to get there, I think. However there seem to be three fundamental concepts underlying Qabalah and they are force, form and consciousness or direction. The spread I’ve used for this reading draws on these.

This particular spread determines the essential energy of the matter, the form the energy uses and the direction of the matter. What, how and where is a very simple way of putting it.

Using the Major Arcana, I drew three cards:

1. Energy: Moon
2. Form: Devil
3. Direction: Emperor

The question was to do with how Pamela Colman Smith would like to be remembered? I've broken it down thus:

What drove Pamela Colman Smith?

The Moon card is stunningly beautiful. The Goddess stands in the pool of the unconscious with symbols of psychic knowledge all around her. The darkness is illuminated with these attributes. In its position on the Tree of Life the Moon combines Victory with the Kingdom of God to produce a more feminine, intuitive aspect to universal consciousness.

Pamela Colman Smith was a student of the occult and a person with profound psychic abilities. She brought these with her into contemporary occult groups such as the Golden dawn but there were other gifts she brought as well. Her design of the RWS Tarot explicitly implies integration of the masculine and feminine, thus making the universal consciousness accessible to everyone through Tarot. This view seems to be validated by the literature, and the Moon card in this reading confirms it too. This assimilation of gender is unusual in most religions and many spiritual endeavours.

I know many of us here have groaned at some of the images but when you look at the light and not the lampshade you see a different message, one that was appropriate in the context of the times.

How will Colman Smith be remembered?

The Devil Card is also striking. His form is orange, yellow and black but the horns and the third eye are inescapable. At his feet a naked man and woman pose. This card is about material success and achievement, mingling victory and beauty on the path to those goals. But the Third Eye beams, reminding us that we can perceive things differently: that the rewards of material success are not what life, happiness and integrity are all about.

This principle is also manifest through Colman Smith’s life and vision. She was an impoverished woman artist and occultist who died with virtually nothing and who now lies buried in an unknown grave. And yet her work, along with that of Waite, launched Tarot into the 20th century and gave it the popular footing it has today. Would we be at Aeclectic now were it not for those first steps?

So the message of her life, as well as that of the Tarot system she visually created, is that spiritual truth lies behind the glossy façade of worldly appearances and success. This understanding is open to anyone.

And so in what direction does this lead us?

The Emperor is a stunningly authoritative figure in glorious orange, surrounded by all the trappings of leadership and power. This image glows with strength, energy and the tenacity to hold to the vision no matter what. Colman Smith’s life demonstrated this as well. The Tarot images took years to produce and, according to various authorities (Kaplan for example), came very much from her own knowledge and spiritual vision. It is ironically representative of her work that the leadership she showed in her humble physical frame and materially diminished life is shown so dramatically in the form of the Emperor.

But that is Colman Smith’s message, I think: that anyone of us can show spiritual leadership; and that this quality in its most humble but glorious way is frequently present in the lives of the ordinary folk around us.


Pamela, you captured my heart and mind today. It is hard to get a strong sense of you from old and fuzzy photographs. You look like any other woman in the street. What you told me through this reading fits with what I have read about you this afternoon. There is not much information about you but your spirit lives in the strong and colourful Tarot you designed, your other paintings and the poignant glimpses of your true self that remain in the material plane.

We celebrate your life.

Moongold

Moongold that was a very beautiful reading and a very wonderful way to remember Pamela Colman Smith for her wonderful work.

I use only her deck for readings (though I have others).

Karen

Moongold said:

I know many of us here have groaned at some of the images

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In my opinion, deriding the images is flat ignorant. Those images are from another time- they are antiques now & cannot be looked at correctly with only modern eyes. One can of course, like or not like according to one's own natural preferences.

The deck is a wonderful mix of medieval & art deco styles.(Not easy to do!) Those images can follow you around for years, sticking in your subconscious mind & talking to you on a whole other level if you are able to experience it.

I know, because after only a brief time playing with it as a teenager & putting it down for the next 25 years, the images were still locked in my head & some of the meanings as well when I saw them again. They draw you back. They are operating on the archetypal level.

I see the reading a little differently though. The combination of the Moon, the Devil , & the Emperor seems to me to be a warning --for women especially-- not to allow themselves to be obscured by bondage to any powerful man or authoritarian system. In the time of Pixie Smith, men still held most of the power and of course the deck she brought into being has always been known as the Rider Waite, never the Pamela Colman Smith.
The Emperor had the fame while she remained the hidden Moon.

Thank you Moongold for these beautiful threads !
Tarotphelia

tarotphelia had a wonderful book, "Women of the Golden Dawn: Rebels and Priestesses" by Mary Greer. she kindly passed it on to me, and at her request i am posting a section about Pamela Colman Smith:

When Arthur Ransome attended one of her evening entertainments, he saw:
a little round woman, scarcely more than a girl...who looked as if she had been the same age all her life...she was dressed in an orange coloured coat that hung loose...with black tassels sewn all over the orange silk...she welcomed us with a most uncanny little shriek, half laugh, half exclamation...she was very dark with a smile that was peculiarly infectious, and the eyes of a joyous, excited child ...

when she told stories, she would wrap her black hair in bright scarves and feathers and wear ropes of coral beads. she lived in a "mad room out of a fairy tale," rather like a curiosity shop.

the walls were dark green, and covered with brilliant colored drawings, etchings, and pastel sketches. a large round table stood near the window, spread with bottles of painting inks with differently tinted stoppers, china toys, paperweights of odd designs, ashtrays, cigarette boxes, and books; it was lit up by a silver lamp, and there was an urn in the middle of it, in which incense was burning.

Re: Re: Reading in memory of Pamela Colman Smith

Tarotphelia said:

I see the reading a little differently though. The combination of the Moon, the Devil , & the Emperor seems to me to be a warning --for women especially-- not to allow themselves to be obscured by bondage to any powerful man or authoritarian system. In the time of Pixie Smith, men still held most of the power and of course the deck she brought into being has always been known as the Rider Waite, never the Pamela Colman Smith.
The Emperor had the fame while she remained the hidden Moon.

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Hi Tarotphelia,

Thanks for your post and for organizing for Napeea to pass on the cameo sketch of Pamela Colman Smith. Arthur Ransome’s description fits with the photographs I’ve been able to see on the internet.

With regard to Pamela’s position in the male/stream that thought has occurred to me but it didn’t come through so much in the reading. The emphasis for me was more on the integration of the archetypes in the major and minor arcana and the capacity of readers of tarot to own those parts of these archetypes that they identify with.

I don’t know whether she intended that or whether it was a later social development. My sense is that she knew she was doing this because it is implicit throughout the deck and I just believe that she would have wanted that. I think she might have had a strong sense of duality within herself. It would be interesting to do some more research. The reading idea just came on me yesterday and happened quite quickly and I could only encompass a few things. I had a very strong feeling of closeness to her before that happened, based on my admiration for her and the more I learned about her as the hours went by yesterday


I wish I knew more about Pamela’s life. I think she was a unique woman who kept her own integrity and who wouldn’t sell that out. She died in poverty but no-one knows more than that. She was intensely psychic and maybe the poverty did not bother her so much spiritually because she had accomplished something quite special and she was her own woman. I have no way of knowing this, however, apart from instinct.

I think I have already seen some original souls like Pamela (but perhaps not so brilliant) and they manage the times they live in, motivated by their own sense of purpose and mission. I’ve always been very careful about analyzing this in the absence of much information and without knowing them all that well. I would really like some more justice to be done in recognising Pamela's work though.

Thanks again, Tarotphelia. She was a fascinating woman, wasn’t she?

Moongold

napaea said:

tarotphelia had a wonderful book, "Women of the Golden Dawn: Rebels and Priestesses" by Mary Greer. she kindly passed it on to me, and at her request i am posting a section about Pamela Colman Smith:

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Napeea,

Thank you for taking the trouble to post the information about Pamela Colman Brown.

I replied hurriedly to Tarotphelia from work today and had to rush away quickly. I'd love to read that book and will try to see if it is still in print.

How many other women were there in the Golden Dawn and who were they? The best I can equate with GD is the Victorian Spiritualist Union here, and they are mostly older women from memory.

There is something about that period and those people which draws me. In some ways the position of women was so restricted for a whole variety of reasons that those unusual ones stand out quite markedly. In some ways they were real groundbreakers The literary ones included Radclyffe Hall, and......I'll hav e ot go back to my books.

Thanks heaps, Napeea.

Moongold

If you can spare the dollars...

...to obtain the Encyclopedia of the Tarot, Volume III, it's one of the most significant biographies that I've read, with Melinda Boyd Parson's contributions making the articles come to life...almost as nicely as Mary Greer, but this has a more broad spectrum of Pamela Colman Smith's life and works.
I find your reading significant and having just read the biography, I would have a take on this:

Moon
If Moon was maternal, which it is in one astrologically bent text of tarot and astrology, then it can also be symbolic of Ellen Terry, the great actress who Pixie Smith travelled with when she was in her teens as a set designer and painter. Ellen Terry was like a second mother to the dark, ageless and imaginative child. Pixie heard music and did her art and seemed to have good, though distant relations to her father early in her life. The family travelled from Jamica, London, New York and other places, but Pixie seemed to like English associations best. Later, after her mother died, her relationship to Ellen Terry, the acting world and her father deepened. These people all encouraged and loved her art and self, dearly. After Ellen Terry's death, it was a blow mentally and otherwise to Pamela Colman Smith.

Devil
She was well-praised by critics and art people alike, but many took advantage of her lack of business sence. By 1900-1909, her art was selling and the artistic/actor/occult people of the Golden Dawn were aware of her beautiful work...but she wasn't paid much. Yeats and others also seemed to treat her as a medium of native ability, kind of as a childish sort. She did have a childish, open and transparent aspect that did seemed publically cheerful and innocent, but she did have a sensitivity to not being appreciated for her intelligence and openness. Her lightness at the secret society attitudes was interpreted not as humor, but as
'not getting it'. She believed in and saw her visonary art with naturalness. While people appreciated her painted vision, they reacted not so kindly to her bohemian appearance and perhaps humorous behavior to what they took seriously.
I was thinking of the female devil who had the fruit of the vine at her tail---holding the means of prosperity and her fidelity to the artistic vision behind her. Yet somehow she never did reach the right yang energy or manifestation of her artistry into true lasting prosperity.
Emporer
She actually later in her life was a companion to her father and they both lived harmoniously for several years in England. Whenever she was encouraged to go to the U.S., she was uneasy by reaction to her appearance and would quickly leave after a few art exhibitions in New York (Alfred Stiglitz, Gallery 291). Publishers and art critics had encouraging words---but somehow, their kindly or paternal attitudes of appreciation for her didn't turn into the material manifestations of prosperity.
She inherited properity from her uncle and settled later in life at an artist colony (Lizard)...and was a faithful member of a Catholic parish, a community partipant with others during World War I and II in helping relief efforts...she was awarded recognition and standing in the Royal Academy of Artists for her efforts, as well...but health and disappointments also took a toll on the aging artist...

I want to thank you, Moongold, for starting these threads of appreciations. These threads and my inspiration from Mary Greer's talk in February 2003 is helping me decide on art and study directions, as well...
Mari Hoshizaki

My appreciation

Mari,

Thank you for your thoughtful response and for the valuable information. I went in search of Volume III of Kaplan last week and discovered that it is out of print. It looks as though a most enjoyable but time taking exploration of the second hand book shops is on the horizon.

I think Stuart Kaplan is still alive. I might write to him and to the publisher suggesting a reprint. I'd love to read that article. As I write it occurs to me that I could try our State Library as well.

Some thoughts about Pixie........She sounds almost like a true innocent. I mean one of those gifted but in some ways vulnerable people who are simply who they are, and are not good at manipulation or the wheeling and dealing people have to do sometimes to get what they want. That could be a presumptuous statement - I don't know.

The extra information certainly adds new dimensions to the reading. This sounds a bit corny, but I felt so close to her that Sunday afternoon. It was as though I had in some way encountered her spirit which I could feel but not see. The search for information has been a hungry one.

I think Pamela Colman Smith needs a voice but I didn't know that there were some wonderful women and men, apart from Stuart Kaplan, already doing this.

Thank you once more. Perhaps you could let us know what you decide in terms of the work to which you alluded? Good luck with it.

Blessings,

Moongold

Moongold, I just wanted to thank-you for caring about Pamela Colman Smith, and taking the time to remember her.

I bought my first Pamela Colman Smith deck today---the Universal Waite version. I was reading about Pixie in the accompanying little booklet and was greatly saddened that she never knew how much her tarot drawings have meant to so many people.

I was happy to find your threads and everybody's posts on Pixie and to know that she is remembered and appreciated.

I feel very emotionally connected with this deck because she did the drawings, and there is something very special about the way she imagined and created.

Thanks again you made my day, Ruby7