AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’ve worked with the Thoth deck for over 50 years because I think it cuts much deeper than the rest. I’m also fond of the Tarot de Marseille (TdM) and the Lenormand cards, and I’m chipping away at playing-card divination, the I Ching and geomancy. The Waite-Smith (RWS) deck is far down in the pecking order and I bring it to public reading sessions only because it’s what people expect to see. I occasionally take it out for private readings, but I feel like I’m putting on shoes that are three sizes too small. Divination should lengthen our metaphorical stride, not pinch our toes.

It’s no secret that the folkloric definitions that have grown up around the RWS tarot over the last century appeal strongly to non-esoteric diviners, who have neither the intellectual curiosity nor the persistence to take on decks that are less anecdotally forthcoming in their visual presentation. The semi-scenic Minor Arcana of the Thoth tarot, the TdM’s graphically modest “pip” cards and the obscurity of standard playing cards are seen by many as impenetrable without a great deal of mental “heavy lifting.”

Aleister Crowley has many detractors among the RWS crowd because he is seen as hopelessly abstruse in his writing and utterly reprehensible in his character. But it can’t be denied that the tarot deck he created with Frieda Harris is a masterpiece of metaphysical erudition, eloquently expressed. When it comes to its Minor Arcana, the projective synthetic geometry of the designs and the artist’s evocative color palette provide an ideal milieu for Crowley’s Qabalistic approach.

In the online tarot community, the RWS deck is the “lingua franca ” (common tongue) for most discussions because all participants, including its detractors, are able to speak it well enough to be understood. I’ve been reading with it since 2011, and I had to learn it to communicate intelligently in the tarot forums of the last decade. But I don’t have to admire it or champion its prosaic storytelling style that encourages imaginative free-association from the images and subverts the benefit of internalizing the traditional knowledge-base (which isn’t always well-served by the conceptual mismatch between Smith’s theatrics and the pompous text of Waite’s Pictorial Key to the Tarot anyway).

The rich heritage of over two centuries of exploration by a “who’s who” of past masters beginning with Etteilla has been shoved aside by those who feel justified in “just winging it” in whatever way strikes their fancy. Their worldview typically does not include the uptake of challenging books on the subject when social-media “influencers” and YouTube “talking heads” can spoon-feed them pre-digested snippets that are easier to comprehend without having to think too hard about it. The upshot is that their predictions are all-too-often “cookie-cutter” in scope and content, a weakness that is easy to spot during any casual visit to one of the numerous tarot sites.

That these tyros are enamored of the RWS tarot is not surprising since Waite intentionally gutted it of most of its occult depth, leaving a vacuum that has been filled with the aforementioned folkloric innuendo, or with surmised spiritual wisdom that is fabricated on-the-fly in the middle of a reading. There is obviously a place for improvisation in any narrative when the “canned” meanings just don’t fit the context, but if the tools of the trade make it central rather than peripheral to the interpretation, there is something wrong with this picture.

In his book Real Magic, Dean Radin talks about “little c” and “big C” consciousness, and when we look closely at the numbered minor cards of the RWS deck it seems that “little c” has taken over and “big C” has left the building. If I want a purely mundane reading I will turn to my Lenormand or TdM deck because both excel at pragmatic divination, and if I seek a deep dive into more arcane waters I will call on the Thoth pack. I will put away the RWS deck as being too much of a chameleon for practical purposes and too much of a lightweight for more profound philosophical questions.