Tarot Is a Language: Why Beginners Should Start with the Rider-Waite-Smith System

Beautiful decks are everywhere. But not all of them help beginners actually learn tarot.

You’ve probably seen the wall.

Hundreds of decks, each one more beautiful than the last, each one whispering pick me.

And the advice you’ll find everywhere — from Reddit threads to TikTok to the person behind the metaphysical shop counter — is some version of the same thing: just choose whatever calls to you.

So you do.

And then you sit down with your beautiful new deck and try to read it, but something just isn’t clicking. You can never remember the cards’ meanings. You’re not sure if what you’re seeing is your intuition talking or your overwhelmed brain just making things up. And suddenly you start to wonder if maybe tarot just isn’t for you.

It is.

You just need a deck that speaks the language you’re trying to learn.

Tarot is a Visual Language

Learning to read tarot isn’t really about memorizing 78 card meanings. From the outside, it can look that way — a big stack of cards with an even thicker book beside them. But that’s not what experienced readers are actually doing.

Tarot is a visual language. And like any language, it has a vocabulary.

The white rose means something. The cliff means something. The bright sun blazing in the corner of a card means something. These aren’t arbitrary artistic choices; they’re a symbolic system that has been built, refined, and collectively absorbed over more than a century.

The Fool card in a Rider–Waite–Smith style tarot deck.

Once you start recognizing that system, something interesting happens. You stop trying to translate every image into a memorized definition, and you begin to read what the card is showing you.

It’s actually not that hard once you see it. White reads as purity, innocence, potential — we already know that, culturally, instinctively. A figure standing at the edge of a cliff reads as a threshold moment, a decision point, something about to change. A bright sun in the corner of a card lifts the whole emotional register of the image. You already speak more of this language than you think. You just haven’t been formally introduced.

Why the Rider–Waite–Smith System is the Standard

The easiest introduction to this symbolic language is the Rider-Waite-Smith system, often simply called the Rider–Waite tarot.

First published in 1909, it wasn’t the first tarot deck ever created, but it was the first widely distributed deck to illustrate every single card. Before that, most tarot decks illustrated only the Major Arcana, while the numbered cards were little more than symbols.

The Rider-Waite-Smith deck changed that. Every card became a scene — a moment in a story you could look at and feel something about before you ever read a word of explanation.

The artist behind those images was Pamela Colman Smith, a woman who spent many years largely uncredited and is only recently receiving the recognition she deserves. She took the symbolic framework of tarot and breathed life into it, creating imagery so resonant that it shaped nearly every tarot deck published in the century since.

Pamela Colman Smith, illustrator of the Rider–Waite–Smith tarot deck.

But here’s the question worth asking: why have her images endured for over a century?

The Psychology Behind the Symbols

The answer lives somewhere between psychology and spirituality.

Carl Jung spent his career mapping what he called the collective unconscious. The idea that beneath our individual minds there is a shared layer of human experience, expressed through symbols and figures, he called archetypes. The Wise Old Man (The Hermit). The Trickster (The Magician). The Great Mother (The Empress).

These aren’t just invented characters; they are patterns so fundamental to human experience that they surface across cultures, across centuries, across mythologies that never had contact with each other. We recognize them so easily because we carry them within us.

The RWS tarot system is fluent in this language. This is why the spiritual reader feels the card meanings, and the psychological reader can explain them. The symbols carry weight because they’re touching something deeply embedded in the human experience of being alive and trying to make sense of it.

The RWS System Is a Tradition, Not Just Another Deck

Something that often gets lost in the “start with Rider-Waite-Smith” conversation is that we’re not talking about a single deck. We’re talking about a tradition.

You don’t have to learn on the original Rider-Waite-Smith deck, though many readers find that helpful. What matters is that the deck you begin with preserves the symbolic structure of the system, or replaces those symbols with ones that communicate the same archetypal story.

The Fool doesn’t have to hold a white flower. But something in the card should communicate something we culturally recognize as pure, naive, fresh, and new. The words might be different, but the story reads the same.

That’s what you’re looking for in a beginner deck. Not identical imagery, but the symbols that tell you the same archetypal story.

The Problem with “Just Choose What Calls to You”

You’ll hear this advice everywhere in the tarot community: just choose whatever calls to you.

And the intention behind that advice is good. Tarot should feel personal, and the relationship between a reader and their deck absolutely matters.

But on its own, that advice can set beginners up for failure.

Giving someone a deck with no connection to the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition is a bit like handing them a book before they’ve learned the alphabet. They don’t know which visual cues matter and which ones don’t. There’s no shared symbolic ground between the reader and the artist.

Some people can intuit their way through that.

But the rest of us just end up feeling lost and frustrated, quietly deciding that tarot must simply be something we are unable to learn.

Starting With a Deck That Teaches the Language

Choosing a deck that calls to you is a beautiful thing. You should absolutely do that. Just make sure the deck you choose still gives you the symbolic tools to learn the language you’re trying to speak.

When you start with a deck rooted in the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition, the patterns begin to emerge. The stories become familiar. The symbols start to speak.

Eventually, you stop trying to remember what the cards mean.

You begin to understand them.

Learning tarot can become one of the most rewarding tools for self-reflection and personal growth. But like learning any language, it helps to begin with a solid foundation.

Start with a deck that speaks the language you’re trying to learn.

Then let what resonates root and trust your intuition for the rest.

Over the coming months, I’ll be exploring tarot symbolism card by card and looking at how these images work together to form the language of the deck.

Note: If you’re looking for a few RWS-style decks, you can find a few suggestions here.

This blog was originally posted on my Substack