06/09/2026
The two biggest tarot decks were made by two men who couldn't stand each other.
If you've ever wondered why one book tells you a card means one thing and another book swears it means something else, this is a big part of the answer.
It starts in a secret club. London, 1888, a magic society called the Golden Dawn, built on a forged manuscript and sealed with an oath never to tell. Arthur Waite joined in 1891. Aleister Crowley joined a few years later and helped blow the whole thing apart. Both walked out with the same secret system. Then they did opposite things with it.
Waite thought fortune-telling was vulgar. He wanted a deck anyone could pick up and read. He didn't draw it. He paid Pamela Colman Smith to do all 78 cards in six months, she gave every number card a scene instead of a pile of cups, and that's the only reason you can read a card you've never studied. She got very little cash for it and was written out of the story for decades.
Crowley thought Waite had made tarot far too polite, so he went the other way. His deck needs astrology and Kabbalah just to get started, and it renames half the cards. He didn't paint his either. Lady Frieda Harris proposed it, bankrolled him, and chose to keep her name off it.
They couldn't even agree what card eight was. Waite's is Strength. Crowley's is Adjustment. Check your own deck.
Both are still in print. Both have serious readers. The people who made them were arguing about what these cards meant, and so has everyone since. You get to join that argument rather than lose it.
Level 1 is called Tarot for Me for a reason. You come out of it trusting your own read of a card instead of waiting for a book to agree with you. Comment COURSE and I'll send you the details.