Rider–Waite–Smith vs Marseille vs Thoth: what actually changes

Four things people mix up

A system is a rulebook: what the cards mean, how court cards are ranked, whether reversals matter. A deck is a specific artistic execution — of a system, or of no particular system at all. An edition is one publisher's release of that deck: a different size, border, or translation of the same underlying art. A school is a teaching lineage, sometimes tied to one deck, sometimes not. Redesigning a deck's artwork doesn't automatically change its system, and a new printer doesn't create a new school.

Etteilla: divination's actual starting point

Before Jean-Baptiste Alliette — writing as Etteilla — tarot was a game with an Egypt-flavored myth attached to it, not a deck built to be read. In the late 1700s he published the first deck explicitly designed for divination: his own card order, his own imagery, his own printed upright and reversed meanings. Almost every later "reading system," including the Golden Dawn's, inherits the basic idea that a deck can be purpose-built for interpretation rather than adapted from a game.

The Golden Dawn lineage: Waite, Crowley, and BOTA

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn wasn't a deck at all — it was a 19th-century English occult order that built a dense correspondence system linking tarot to astrology, Kabbalah, and the four classical elements. Three separate, still-active lineages trace directly back to it:

• Rider-Waite-Smith — A.E. Waite's 1909 deck, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. This is the system TarotCards24's card meanings are built on.
• Thoth — Aleister Crowley's separate, deliberately different system, developed with artist Lady Frieda Harris and layered with his own Thelemic philosophy on top of Golden Dawn correspondences.
• BOTA (Builders of the Adytum) — a teaching organization founded by Paul Foster Case, weaving tarot into a broader curriculum of Kabbalah and ceremonial color work. It's a school with its own materials, not a repackaging of Waite's deck.

Waite and Crowley trained in the same order and then went separate ways — which is why their decks share some structural DNA (78 cards, four suits) while disagreeing on card names, court ranks, and correspondence tables.

Marseille's own methods, not one fixed reading

Because the historical Marseille pattern shows repeated suit symbols rather than illustrated scenes on its numbered Minor Arcana, reading it well needs its own method rather than borrowed RWS instincts. Two well-documented modern approaches: Tarology, developed by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Marianne Costa, reads the whole deck's structure, numbers, and color relationships for self-knowledge; Open Reading, developed by Yoav Ben-Dov around his CBD restoration of the deck, focuses on how the images in a spread visually interact, and explicitly allows reading without reversals at all. Neither is "the" correct way to read Marseille — they're two authored methods within the same historical family.

The Egyptian-occult branch — several systems, one shared theme

"Egyptian tarot" isn't a single lineage. Etteilla's original deck carried Egyptian theming from the start; later 19th-century authors Paul Christian and his illustrators Falconnier and Wegener built their own 22-card Egyptian-themed system; 20th-century organizations like the Church of Light produced their own full 78-card Egyptian deck with an entirely separate guidebook. These share imagery and a claimed ancient-Egyptian connection, not a common author or rulebook.

Modern authored decks: a shared skeleton, not a shared system

Since the mid-20th century, decks like Motherpeace, the Haindl Tarot, and the Wildwood Tarot have kept the familiar 78-card, four-suit structure as scaffolding while building entirely their own imagery and, often, their own interpretive layer — closer to a new authored work than a Rider-Waite-Smith reskin. Treat each as its own system with its own guidebook, not a variation to be read with RWS meanings.

What's next to tarot, but isn't tarot

Petit Lenormand is a separate 36-card cartomancy system with its own imagery and method — not a tarot variant, despite often sharing shelf space with it. Kipper cards form a different picture-card divination tradition again. And several historically related card games — Austrian Tarock, Italian Tarocchini, French Tarot itself — use tarot-pattern decks purely to play a trick-taking game, with no reading tradition attached at all.