Why old tarot pip cards have no pictures (and what changed in 1909)

Pull the Five of Cups from a Rider-Waite-Smith deck and you get a small story: a cloaked figure staring down at three spilled goblets, apparently unaware that two more still stand upright behind them. Pull the same card from a Tarot de Marseille deck and you get exactly what the name promises — five cups, arranged in a symmetrical geometric pattern, and nothing else. No figure, no grief, no unnoticed cups standing behind. This isn't a simplified or lower-budget version of the RWS card. For nearly the entire history of tarot before 1909, every deck's numbered cards looked like that.

The 40 numbered cards in a tarot deck — Ace through Ten, across all four suits — are called pip cards, and the old convention was to print them exactly the way a modern poker deck still prints its numbered cards: suit symbols repeated and arranged in a pattern, with no illustrated scene attached. Nobody expects a story from a seven of clubs in a standard card deck today, and for most of tarot's history, nobody expected one from a Five of Cups either. Only the 22 Major Arcana and the 16 court cards got full pictorial treatment; the 40 pips were pure geometry.

That changed in 1909, when Arthur Edward Waite commissioned the artist and occultist Pamela Colman Smith to design a complete 78-card deck, published by William Rider & Son. Waite worked closely with Smith on the Major Arcana's symbolism, but left the Minor Arcana's pip cards almost entirely to her own discretion — and she used that freedom to do something no major deck had done before: turn every single numbered card, not just the trumps, into a fully illustrated scene with figures, settings, and implied narrative.

The effect on how tarot gets read was enormous, and it's arguably the single biggest reason Rider-Waite-Smith became the most widely used deck in the world. A beginner holding a plain geometric Five of Cups has to memorize what "five" and "cups" mean and combine them from scratch. A beginner holding Smith's illustrated Five of Cups can look at a grieving figure standing in front of two cups still upright, and arrive at something close to "loss, but not total loss" through intuition alone — no keyword system required. That single innovation, more than any renamed card or swapped letter, is why modern tarot reading looks and feels the way it does.