by Marcus Katz
After this Pamela would spend her time between New York and Kingston to fit in with her father’s work.
There is much speculation in regards to Pamela’s rather exotic looks; we see from photographs that her looks could give rise to any number of interpretations. Yeats wrote in a letter that he thought she “looks exactly like a Japanese.” There is speculation over this even today, and it is hard to completely disregard this when you look at a photograph of her. There are many assertions on the Internet; some say Pamela’s mother was Jamaican or that it was possible Pamela was not the birthchild of her parents. We have documents showing that Pamela’s legal mother was not Jamaican, but American. Pamela’s birth certificate as a legal document places her firmly as the biological child of the Smiths—and nothing other than DNA testing could prove otherwise. (1878, Qrt M, Vol: 1a, 432). Anything other than this is speculation, and speculation it will always be.
The young Colman Smith’s first arrival in the West Indies must have been quite a contrast to the environment she was used to in England. However exciting, it would have been quite an adjustment, just the weather alone!
On October 4, 1893, she arrived in New York on the SS Alene from Kingston. Then aged fifteen years, Pamela travelled with her mother Corinne Smith, aged forty-five years. One thing that becomes apparent from primary sources such as the census and the passenger lists is that Mrs. Smith was fluid with her age, not just by the odd year but by up to twelve years. In this, she was in good company with the likes of Nellie Ternan (1839–1914), the mistress of Charles Dickens; Ternan erased fourteen years of her life when she married for the first time at her “actual” age of thirty-seven. She told her husband she was a mere twenty-three years of age! It was a time when it was simpler to conceal and fabricate information and even reinvent yourself. It does make one a little curious about whether Corinne Smith was attempting to conceal a secret other than her age.
Once established in New York, on October 23, 1893, Pamela enrolled at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, whose motto is “Be true to your work, and your work will be true to you.” Here she would be schooled in techniques that harnessed her unique style that would birth the Waite-Smith tarot seventeen years later. A tutor who was to influence her abilities was Arthur Wesley Dow. She left Pratt in June 1897.
It was perhaps in 1901 when she met up with Ellen Terry and Edy Craig. Pamela forged a special relationship with Edy; they both shared the same sense of fun and a delight in being mischievous. It was in this company that Pamela drew the caricatures of the group and the images of her and Edy as “devils” Pixie and Puck. This self-cartooning of Edy and Pamela is also present in Ellen Peg’s Book of Merry Joys, or the Peggy Picture Book (1900) they created together. Poking fun at the solemnity of Stoker and the autocracy of Irving, Pamela portrayed Stoker as “Bramy Joker” and Edward Gordon Craig as “the Tedpecker.”11
9. Our Adventures, Pamela Colman Smith, 1902. (Illustration courtesy of authors, private collection.)
In 1902, Pamela stayed with the Davis family in Kensington, London. The Davises were cousins by marriage to Ellen Terry and part of the acting fraternity themselves.
On January 28, 1909, Pamela travelled alone to New York aboard the Minnetonka to attend her exhibition. She would return to England on May 24, 1909. It is from this date (we think it unlikely she would have started beforehand) that we can assume she started the tarot work, which was completed by November. Allowing her a few days to get herself unpacked, this means that the deck was created in no more than five and a half months.
10. Our Adventures, Pamela Colman Smith 1902. (Illustration courtesy of authors, private collection.)
On March 24, 1916, she applied for a US passport. Her occupation is classed as “Artist & Illustrator” and that she had last left the US in April 1912. Her permanent residence was recorded as Carlyle Place, London. Pamela was thirty-eight years old, described as being
5' 4", and having dark brown hair, brown eyes, a broad nose, round face, a medium forehead, and medium complexion. Pamela’s actual passport photograph is reproduced at www.waitesmithtarot.com. Her citizenship is attested by letters from three people, one of whom is Ellen Terry, then residing at 2 Kings Road, London. This latter fact is interesting as it shows that whilst Pamela may have changed her circle of friends by 1913 due to her conversion to Roman Catholicism, she was still in touch with Terry three years later and the relationship was still close enough for her to ask for this favour.
Pamela and Opal Hush
One record we have of Pamela’s favourite drink at the time is given in Ransome’s description of her party. There she served Opal Hush, and we can give a likely recipe for this simple cocktail: about a third of a short glass of red claret topped with lemonade delivered through a siphon. The aim is to have a nice “amethystine” rose foam on the surface of the drink. If you wish, add ice and a slice of lime for garnish, and drink through a straw.
The drink was a good way to make cheap claret last longer, and was possibly named by W. B. Yeats or “AE,” who was George William Russell (1867–1935). He was supposed to go by the name “AEON,” but a publisher missed the last two letters, so he became AE.
Pamela’s Name
“Pixie” and “Puck” were the nicknames of Pamela and Edy Craig, likely given by Ellen Terry. A telegraph from her to Mary Fanton Roberts (1864–1956) in 1907 is simply signed off as Pamela Smith. Roberts was a leading light in theatrical circles in New York and editor of The Craftsman, and Pamela arranged to meet her in January 1907.12
Pamela’s Magical Motto
Pamela’s motto in the Golden Dawn was Quod Tibi Id Allium (Q. T. I. A.), which translates as “Whatever You Would Have Done to Thee,” although Gilbert suggests it should read Quod Tibi id aliis.13 This motto is a version of Matthew 7:12 and Luke 6:31, the so-called Golden Rule of doing unto others as you would have done unto yourself.
Pamela’s Art and Influences
The first female artist to be given a gallery exhibition by Alfred Stieglitz, Pamela’s work there has since been described by Kathleen Pyne, Professor of the History of Art at the University of Notre Dame, as the art of “an androgynous sorceress, a prophetess who seeks and finds the cosmic, heroic voice in nature.”14 Pyne compares one self-portrait, Beethoven Sonata No. 11—Self Portrait (1907), to the art of tarot in which a “medium seeks and finds a vision of the future” and ultimately, as evidenced by Sketch for Glass (1908), “is reborn into a state of spiritual enlightenment.”15
Pyne notes that Pamela presented herself to Stieglitz as a visionary, claiming—as we see elsewhere—that her art was drawn from the “subconscious energies” of her mind, liberated by music. Pyne also lists Pamela’s inspirations as Kate Greenaway, Walter Crane, William Blake, and Japanese printmakers such as Hokusai.16 Pyne suggests that the childlike nature of Pamela’s presentation was deliberately cultivated as it appealed to those seeking an artist who was tapping into the depths of the psyche.
Pamela was able to rapidly create character and personality from just a few brush-strokes, indeed, similar to certain styles of Japanese art. It is almost zenlike in its simplicity.
11. Portrait of a Young Girl, Pamela Colman Smith. (Illustration courtesy of authors, original painting in private collection.)
12. W. B. Yeats by Pamela Colman Smith, 1901. (Illustration courtesy of authors, private collection.)
She was also able to paint quickly. A confirmation of Pamela’s rate of production is given through a letter written by her to Stieglitz in late 1907, where she relates that in one recent week alone, she had completed ninety-four drawings, “almost all of them usable ones.”17 It was just two years later that her speed of creation would be put to use by Waite in the rapid production of their tarot deck.
That Pamela was not “school-taught” is evident in her work, her advice to other artists, and the reviews of her work. In a 1903 review of Pamela’s new venture,
The Green Sheaf, her work was characterised as having benefitted from her move to London. Her work was characterised as possessing “the freshness, the spontaneity, the naïve charm that owed everything to nature and little or nothing to the schools.”
In this environment that “better conserves her inherent tendencies” she had started The Broad Sheet with Jack B. Yeats, and had in 1903 released the first of her Green Sheaf publications. She wrote this about the periodical:
My Sheaf is small … but it is green. I will gather into my Sheaf all the young, fresh things I can—pictures, verses, ballads of love and war; tales of pirates and the sea.
You will find the ballads of the old world in my Sheaf. Are they not green forever.
Ripe ears are good for bread, but green ears are good for pleasure.
I hope you will have my Sheaf in your house and like it.
It will stay fresh and green then.
Whilst noting that the contributors to the Sheaf are those associated with the new Irish literary movement—and more theatrical contacts such as Christopher St. John and others—the reviewer also points out that “the largest contributor is Miss Smith herself.”
When she resigned from working on The Broad Sheet in 1903, Jack Yates noted with some regret that she always “has so many ‘irons’ in the fire that she can never do the colouring with any comfort to herself.”
Pamela was proposed as a member of the RSA (Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) by Committee and given that fellowship on October 13, 1941. Her occupation was listed as artist, illustrator, and interestingly, teller of folk stories from Jamaica.18 This moment of recognition came just ten years prior to her death in 1951.
13. Broad Sheet by Pamela Colman Smith.
(Illustration courtesy of authors, private collection.)
The Secret of the Flower Book
In Rottingdean, a small village just a little farther down the coast from Winchelsea, between 1882–1898, the artist Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898) created a series of thirty-eight small circular paintings as a leisurely pursuit from his other work.19 Most of the images were created in Rottingdean, and were inspired by the same landscape of East Sussex as the Waite-Smith tarot.
The book contained paintings inspired by the names of flowers and was circulated by his wife as The Flower Book, of which just three hundred copies were made in 1905. In 1909, the year in which the Waite-Smith tarot was created, the book was purchased and deposited in the British Museum where both Waite and Pamela might have seen it, had they not done so before. Certainly Pamela would have likely been aware of the book, as Burne-Jones was a major influence on her work.
As we will see in our exploration of individual cards, The Flower Book contains several images that likely inspired Pamela’s art. Burne-Jones intended not to illustrate the flowers but “wring their secret from them.” He illustrated the names with mythic, biblical, and Arthurian images, many of which bear an uncanny resonance to Pamela’s work on the tarot.
To find one picture out there in the art world that bears a “similarity” to Pamela’s work is not difficult, as all art ultimately deals with the same themes. However, when we discover a whole sequence of images by an artist known to Pamela and which were in circulation prior to her own work, it is difficult not to see that these would have inspired her project.
14. False Mercury by Edward Burne-Jones. (Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum, used under license.)
The particular cards we will look at in this light are the 2 of Pentacles and the 2 and 3 of Wands, although we offer here a list of other possible correspondences for those readers who may wish to allocate these particular flowers and titles to the cards in the style of Burne-Jones:
Majors
Lovers: Adder’s Tongue
Hermit: Witch’s Tree
Temperance: Flower of God, also Ladder of Heaven
Devil: Black Archangel
Star: Star of Bethlehem
Tower: Arbor Tristis
Last Judgement: Morning Glories
World: Rose of Heaven, also Marvel of the World
15. Comes He Not by Edward Burne-Jones. (Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum, used under license.)
Minors
Ace of Cups: Golden Cup
Ace of Pentacles: Golden Gate
Ace of Wands: Key of Spring
2 of Pentacles: False Mercury
2 of Wands/3 of Wands: Comes He Not
6 of Swords: Flame Heath
9 of Pentacles: Love in a Tangle
9 of Swords: Wake, Dearest
9 of Wands: Helen’s Tears
Court Cards
Knight of Pentacles: Saturn’s Loathing
Knight of Swords: Honour’s Prize
The Secret of the Theatre
Pamela was a child of the theatre. She went as far to say that “the stage has taught me almost all I know of clothes, of action and of pictorial gestures.”20 She suggested that the stage was a great school for the illustrator, as well as the observations of everyday life. As we will see later, in our chapter on “Pamela’s Music,” she was also aware that she had the ability to see music as images (synesthesia); she wrote in 1908 that “sound and form are more closely connected than we know.”21
Pamela had both her own personal experience and knowledge of the theatre and also through Irving, Gillette, Terry, and the stage design ethos of Edward Gordon Craig, Ellen Terry’s illegitimate son. It was Craig who had truly grown up in the theatre; he was an influential and innovative stage designer, writing On the Art of the Theatre in 1904.
16. Pamela Colman Smith by Alphaeus Cole, courtesy of Stuart Kaplan. Image is not for reproduction.
If we look at Pamela’s advice for perceiving art taken from her own experience and look through the lens of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), we can perhaps model her methodology and use it. In fact, it turns out that Pamela actually describes a technique already known in NLP called the “Swish Pattern.” It works with the way we tend to put things into the “corners” of our minds.
To incorporate this method in our card reading based on modelling Pamela’s own description of how she created her art, we would take the following steps.
Pamela’s Reading Method
Select a question. Keep it short and succinct. We will use a one-card method for this, although it is possible with practice to use several cards. Shuffle your deck, considering the question, and turn it face down—you are going to read the card on the top of the face-down deck, but not yet.
Now imagine the question as a piece of text or writing inside your mind on a large mental screen. You may need to close your eyes. Choose a good font and colour for the text. Read it several times inside your mind. If you are not a naturally “visual” person, simply imagine that you have these words, or hear them—you can even feel them if you wish, so long as you have a strong representation inside your mind.
Close your eyes, if you have not already done so, and take a deep breath in. As you do so, “squish” your mental screen text into the bottom-left corner of your mind. It should be a small box, like a flashing cursor, with no text viewable in it.
Now open your eyes and turn over a card.
As you see the card, imagine the text inside your mind springing back up from its box to its full size, as Pamela says, “Call it up … and review your work in front of it.”22 See the image in front of the text, as if the text is a watermark or transparency behind the card.
Allow any feelings to arise in answer to the question. It may even be that you do not get anything consciously, but over time answers arise, solutions present themselves, or dreams provide insight. This is often an entirely unconscious process, tapping into the deep well from which Pamela drew her art.
Other considerations you may adopt i
n your reading of the Waite-Smith deck based on what Pamela felt was important to her art are:
Body Posture: Pamela says “First watch the simple forms of joy, of fear, of sorrow; look at the position taken by the whole body, then the face—that can come afterward.”
Clothing: how it is worn, not the costume itself. That is, “Look at the clothes, hat, cloak, armor, belt, sword, dagger, rings, boots, jewels. Watch how the cloak swings when the person walks, how the hands are used. See if you can judge if the clothes are correct, or if they are worn correctly; for they are often ruined by the way they are put on. An actor should be able to show the period and manner of the time in the way he puts on his clothes, as well as the way he uses his hands, head, legs.” 23
See what is exaggerated: Pamela suggested that whilst the stage may be “false and unreal,” so too is illustration. In what she chose to exaggerate in an image, we can sense what she wanted us to feel. And she said, “Above all, feel everything! And make other people when they look at your drawing feel it too!” 24
When we apply these simple observations to a card such as the 9 of Cups, we can see that the actor has adopted a very wide and exaggerated sitting stance. If you take this stance, you will feel instantly that it is a front—a pretence. Your hands rest loosely on folded arms that are actually kept quite wide, and your feet point widely outwards, the right slightly ahead of the left. You may even feel as if you are about to break out into a Ukrainian hopak (sometimes called a Cossack dance).
