Episode #213
The Quite Genius of the Tarot Deck
TYou've almost certainly seen it — the most famous tarot deck in the world, the one nearly every reading uses and nearly every other deck imitates. Most people think of it as just "the tarot cards." It's actually a work of deliberate genius, a little over a century old, and the story of who really made it is remarkable. In this episode we explore the 1909 deck that changed tarot forever by being the first to fully illustrate all 78 cards — and the artist who painted them, Pamela Colman Smith, a synesthete who "painted feeling," was paid a flat fee, earned nothing as the deck sold in the millions, and was left off its name for a century. We also crack open a single card — the Three of Swords — to show the genius up close: the heart in it isn't broken, it's whole, pierced clean through and still intact, a quiet message of survival folded into the most painful card in the deck. A wondrous look at the tool we read with, and the woman who deserves her name on it. The podcast has an accompanying blog: The Quiet Genius of the Tarot Deck We Read With
