Next time you get a tarot reading, ask your advisor what deck they use. The cards give off powerful energies; certain decks will speak directly to you.
Making a solid spiritual connection with a deck leads to deeper insights into your past, present, and future. This connection goes a long way in getting a reading that genuinely resonates with you.
Many advisors on Purple Garden Tarot Readings use the classic Rider Waite deck. They’re experts on the cards, but it helps to go into a reading with an understanding of this deck. If you’re familiar with what each card symbolizes, you’ll learn more revelations about yourself and your life.
Rider Waite tarot decks are universal tarot cards that have inspired so many other decks. Each card has a powerful meaning that gets more profound when it plays off other cards.
Table of Contents
How and When Was Rider Waite Tarot Deck Invented?
Artist Pamela Colman Smith collaborated with occultist A. E. Waite to create the original Rider Waite Tarot Deck in 1909. While tarot cards date back to the 1400s, Rider Waite cards were the first to bring tarot to the scene.
Colman Smith’s illustrations set the deck apart. It was the first made with original artwork on the cards. Upon release, mass marketing efforts took tarot reading out of the shadows, making it a widespread practice today.
The Role of Rider Waite Deck in Tarot Readings
Tarot readings use cards to formulate insights into a person’s past, present, and future.
The Rider Waite Deck Cards in tarot readings are a guide. Each card features an illustration with its name, image, and symbol that offer further insight. The person reading the tarot cards feeds off the energy of the person they’re reading and the cards to interpret what the cars say.
A singular card has meaning and can offer insight, but a tarot reading requires multiple cards. It’s not until all the cards are chosen that the message is displayed. Different cards and meanings play off the others in your reading for a clearer understanding.
The Look and Symbols of Rider Waite Tarot Deck Cards
Each card in a Rider Waite tarot deck means something different. The illustration on each card represents the overall interpretation, but you can dive further into their inner meaning.
The original art goes into heavy detail. However, certain elements featured on the cards are even more special and offer further insight.
There are symbols used throughout the deck that expand upon the card and its inner meanings. The most significant cards are categorized using symbols to tie them together.
The Most Significant Cards in Rider Waite Deck
With 78 cards in a Rider Waite tarot deck, your reading will be thorough and significant regardless of the cards you receive. However, these specific groups of cards stand out for several reasons.
Whether new to tarot or not, you’ve likely heard of these five card symbols. Here is why they’re categorized this way and what each means.
Major Arcana
The Major Arcana cards focus on a central theme of life. More specifically, the lessons we’re currently learning, the lessons we’ve learned, and the lesson we will learn in the future. These cards can sway a reading one way or another and typically take control due to their vagueness.
The Major Arcana cards have some of the most well-known cards in a tarot deck. These include cards like The Fool, The Hermit, The Tower, Death, The Moon, and The Emperor.
The Swords
The Swords center around the mind. This includes our intellect, beliefs, attitude, thoughts, and overall mentality toward our past, present, and future. The cards utilize swords with two edges instead of one to show intellect is powerful, but there must be a balance.
The Wands
Tarot cards with wands are all about your personality and what goes on within you spiritually. Tarot readings and astrology can go hand in hand, and these cards are the primary connection to fire signs. These cards are about your energy and who you are as a person.
They can tell us who we are in reading and advise us to focus more on ourselves or whatever can increase our energy and help us become the best version of ourselves.
The Cups
The Cups are a symbol of emotions, most specifically love or any intense feeling. They are a sign that you may have a positive source of emotions in your life or that this emotion outweighs everything else.
Associated with water signs, the cups are free-flowing. Alongside love and emotions come the effects of both, such as loss, healing, and renewal.
The Pentacles
The Pentacles represent Earth signs, and their meanings refer to the things outside our control as humans. This includes our lives and the situations we find ourselves in, such as work-life, social life, money, and physical health.
While these are the main factors that these cards will offer insight into, when played off of other cards, they can provide relationship insights and how our lives impact them.
The Most Important Rider Waite Tarot Deck Meanings
The best rider waite tarot deck readings will offer one of the main five categories of insights about your past, present, and future.
Spiritual Meaning
Spiritual results from a tarot card reading is a broad meaning because all tarot readings have a spiritual connection. The entire point of looking to a deck of tarot cards for insights is that you believe in a spiritual connection and trust the cards to offer wisdom.
Some tarot readings can express that your spiritual connection is strong, weak, or somewhere in the middle. The Wands are the cards that tackle this specific meaning and provide insights into your spiritual relationships, emotions, and being.
Love and Relationship Meaning
The tarot gives us insight into love and relationships. You can ask the cards about the lasting impact of a past lover, the future of your current relationship, or how a potential love interest will change your life.
If you want to learn about love, cross your fingers for a Cup card. The Cups express the love you have or seek.
Remember, the cards bounce off one another to provide a full reading. Paired with a Major Arcana or any other category, it can tell you why things have gone awry or why something will go your way.
Success and Happiness Meaning
Success and happiness are subjective to anyone seeking a tarot card deck reading. However, almost any card pairing can offer some form of future or present happiness, like newfound love or success, like a promotion at work.
In terms of finding or keeping happiness and success in your life, whatever you want from your reading can be expressed through multiple cards and symbols.
Finance Meaning
Finances meanings in tarot readings are popular due to all the problems many of us could solve if we had a little more money. While the Pentacles can focus on offering insight into more than just money, they are the best card to receive if you’re hoping for some financial wisdom.
These cards may focus on future experiences that can lead to monetary success or advise you to stay on your path and remain patient.
Daily Meaning
Daily Tarot cards readings and meanings refer to the present or the near future. These readings provide insights into anything in your life, why it’s turning out the way it is, and a potential solution or answer to turn it around or keep it in the right direction.
It will pick up on the energies surrounding you and offer advice on your current situations, the information you’re looking for, or answer questions you’ve been struggling to learn.
Any card in the deck can provide a daily meaning to questions you want to answer.
Conclusion/Summary
Tarot Deck Rider Waite cards focus on detail and provide descriptive insights into their inner meaning and how each card can complement the other.
On top of their history in making tarot reading popular, these cards can be categorized by their symbols and offer further insight into your reading.
There are all kinds of tarot decks to choose from now, but the original artwork from Rider Waite started Tarot’s rise to fame and led to all the other options we see today.
