Spiritflow

What follows is an imaginative letter grounded in the known contours of Smith’s life and work. It is not presented as a recovered document, but as an exercise in scholarly empathy—an attempt to let biography speak in a human voice.

PAMELA COLMAN SMITH SPEAKS

I will begin with a small confession: if you want the quickest way to understand why Tarot mattered to me, do not begin with temples or doctrines.

Begin with a stage.

Tarot as Miniature Theater

Do you know what miniature theater is?

Picture a little square world—paper figures, bright costumes, a few props, a backdrop—everything small enough to hold, but large enough to enchant. A lamp throws a warm oval of light across the tabletop. In my youth, before your era’s glowing screens and endless clips, imagination had to do more of its own work.

And it did.

When I was eighteen, I made a miniature drama about the Welsh privateer Henry Morgan. The children leaned forward as if the paper could breathe: pirates, noble strangers, fine ladies and gentlemen, bright danger, bright longing. I can still remember the scissors leaving their clean little bites in the card, the faint smell of ink and glue, and the way a costume—only a scrap of colored paper—can feel like a full world when the story catches fire. 

That is what theater does: it persuades us—happily, willingly—to feel something as true before we can prove it.

When Arthur Edward Waite approached me in 1909 about a new Tarot deck, my mind went straight back to that little stage. Not because I believed paper was magic in itself, but because I knew what a staged image can do inside a human being. Put a figure in a posture. Give them a weather. Give them a threshold. Give them a choice. And suddenly the reader is no longer looking at ink; they are looking at a living predicament.

Tarot is theater you can lay on a table.

A spread is simply a sequence of scenes. And once you have scenes, you have story. And once you have story, you have the human soul doing what it always does: searching for meaning, rehearsing courage, mourning losses, testing hope, making vows, breaking them, returning, trying again. 

You lean closer, as if the card might whisper if you bring your face near enough. You feel the grain of paper under your fingertips. A small stage, yes—but it can hold a great deal.

I was not the most learned initiate in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. But I understood staging. I understood rehearsal: the way a gesture becomes true by being repeated, the way a scene begins to breathe when you have lived inside it long enough. I understood the power of a single image to become a doorway.

And I believed—still believe—that the arts are branches of one tree. Theater, music, painting, poetry, story: different leaves, one root. The root is inward sight. So much of life tries to train us to use only the eyes in our skull. But the deeper life—the one that changes us—requires the eyes within.

That is what I tried to paint: not mere illustrations, but doorways.

The Pressures That Make a Life

Now let me be honest in a less charming way: my life did not unfold in a gentle studio with reliable patronage and a quiet confidence that the rent would be paid. There were London rooms with thin walls and colder corners than one expects. There were mornings when the light was good and the coal was not. There were days when the rain made everything smell of soot and damp wool, and the post brought nothing you could spend.

I was born into inherited expectations—family stories, family standards, the quiet demand to “be somebody.” My parents, each in their own manner, carried unrealized dreams. And children, as you know, often become the vessel into which those dreams are poured—whether we consent or not.

If you have learned Tarot’s language, you will recognize this as a kind of Major Arcana pressure: the sense that something larger than your preferences is pushing your life into shape. There is a Chariot energy to it—movement, striving, determination—but also strain. The will tries to pull a life forward before the life has the stable ground it needs.

In my own home, striving did not guarantee peace. Talent did not guarantee security. Beauty did not guarantee freedom. And for a woman, the world offered admiration far more readily than it offered authority.

So I made certain decisions early. I would not be a decorative bird in a gilded cage. I wanted to work. I wanted to make things. I wanted to be my own strange self without apology. And I wanted—this is important—to be taken seriously as an artist.

That desire is not frivolous. It is a Wands desire: vocation, agency, the will to create a life that is truly one’s own.

But Wands, as you know, burns fuel. And fuel costs money.

The Minor Arcana in a Working Artist’s Life

If the Major Arcana describes the great turning points and inner initiations, the Minor Arcana describes the daily weather: what it feels like to live inside time—inside body, labor, hunger, longing, conflict, friendship, fatigue. The small truths: the taste of weak tea when there is nothing else, the ache in the wrist after too many hours drawing, the grit of charcoal under the nail.

Let me name the four suits as they lived in me.

Pentacles: the hard ground of money and survival

My Pentacles story is plain: I struggled.

There were seasons of acclaim, yes—books illustrated, projects praised, circles opened to me. But the marketplace treated women like ornamental talent rather than professional equals. “You’re brilliant” is a lovely sentence; “Here is reliable pay” is a holier one.

I wrote letters that amounted to prayers: I am badly in need of money. Do you know anyone who would buy drawings? I want money for Christmas. And even when I had posted such words, I still had to wait—boots damp by the door, paper on the table, the mind trying not to count the days. If you have never had to speak in those humiliating tones, I hope you never do. It compresses the spirit. It makes art feel like bargaining with the air.

Even the Tarot work—yes, even that—was “a big job for very little cash.” I remember the peculiar sting of it: hours of careful line, wash, and color; the smell of ink; the fatigue behind the eyes—then the smallness of the payment when it finally came, as if the work were a charming trifle and not a true labor of mind and hand. And it left me without the profits that might have created stability later. 

That is Pentacles imbalance: craft without compensation; labor without sufficient return; the body trying to be noble while the stomach makes its own arguments.

If you are reading Tarot, do not romanticize this suit. Honor it. If your life lacks stability, that is not a spiritual failure. It is a material condition. Tarot does not ask you to transcend your rent. It asks you to tell the truth about your life and begin where you actually are.

Wands: the aspiration to live by one’s own flame

My Wands story is equally plain: I wanted independence.

I wanted to make my own work and shape my own path. I wanted the dignity of creative authority. I wanted a life that did not require permission.

This is why I tried to build my own little publishing haven—The Green Sheaf—a place where work, especially women’s work, could appear without asking the gatekeepers to bless it. I can still feel the press of it: layouts, deadlines, envelopes, the hope of each new issue—then the exhaustion, the accounts, the sense of building a fire with damp wood. It was a brave experiment; it was also exhausting; and it did not survive the financial reality of the world it resisted.

That is Wands, too: bold beginning, fierce integrity, and the constant question—how do I keep the fire going without burning down my own house?

Cups: the yearning for inward completion

My Cups story is subtler. Cups is not only romance, as some insist on believing. It is the ache for wholeness—the hunger for the inward country to feel like home.

I was drawn to myth, to symbol, to states of feeling that arrived like music and became landscapes. Some call this synesthesia; others call it vision. 

I simply call it the interior world insisting it is real.

When I painted, I was not merely decorating. I was trying to give outer form to inner knowing—to evoke the sense that life is more than the visible, more than the practical, more than the popular. There is a moment, when you are working, when the room falls away: only the brush, the paper, and the color spreading like weather across a small sky.

Cups is the suit that says: I will not live only on the surface.

If you have that yearning—if you feel “haunted” by beauty, symbol, poetry, Tarot—then I bless that in you. It can become escape, yes. It can become distortion. But it can also become nourishment, meaning, and genuine spiritual depth.

Swords: the conflict for truth, dignity, and self-definition

And then there is Swords.

To be a woman making serious art in a man’s world required Swords. To insist on being regarded as more than a novelty required Swords. To endure dismissal, patronizing praise, underpayment, and the constant pressure to soften one’s edges—this is Swords territory. Sometimes it is not a grand duel; it is the steady grind of being smiled at while being refused.

And yes, my private life also required Swords.

I will say this carefully, because your age still enjoys euphemism: I loved women. I built my life in women’s spaces because I trusted them—because I was safer there, because I could breathe there. If later I shared my home with Nora Lake, do not reduce that to a “longtime friend” simply to keep polite stories tidy. Swords is the suit that refuses tidy lies.

Truth requires a blade sometimes—not to wound, but to cut away what is false. A clean cut. A clean life, if you can manage it.

If your Tarot practice never touches Swords, it will remain charming but shallow. Let it teach you how to tell the truth cleanly, without cruelty.

How Tarot Transformed Me

You might ask how Tarot itself changed me.

It changed me by confirming something I already suspected: that ordinary life contains symbolic depth, and that symbolic depth can be staged.

To paint those cards was to practice a kind of disciplined listening. Not listening only to Arthur Edward Waite, though I listened to him. Not listening only to old sources, though I studied them (yes, I visited the British Museum to look at the Sola Busca Tarot images when they were available to see). Tarot changed me because it demanded that I translate inner knowing into visible form—again and again—seventy-eight times. It is one thing to dream; it is another to sit down, day after day, and make the dream legible in line and color, with a hand that cramps and a mind that must choose.

That is spiritual practice: repetition that transforms character.

Also—Tarot humbled me. The more archetypes you paint, the less you can pretend you are only one thing. You cannot paint the Fool and believe you will never be foolish. You cannot paint the Five of Pentacles and believe hunger is always someone else’s problem. You cannot paint the Devil and remain innocent about the Hyde that lives within every socially-acceptable Jekyll.

The cards insist: you are plural.

And in a strange twist of fate, Tarot gave me what the marketplace often refused: lasting witness. The world that underpaid me could not prevent my work from walking forward into later decades, finding readers I would never meet, speaking in contexts I could not imagine.

That is a kind of grace, even if it arrived late.

The Major Arcana as the Movements of a Life

Now—those larger forces.

If I look back at my life through Tarot’s Major Arcana, I do not see a single neat “hero story.” I see initiations—doors that opened, doors that closed, thresholds crossed without certainty.

There was a Magician season: skill gathering, artistic tools becoming extension of will—pen nib, brush, pigment, the small discipline of learning what a line can do.

There was a High Priestess season: inward listening, imagination not as entertainment but as a spiritual faculty—the hush that comes when you stop trying to impress and simply attend.

There was an Empress season: making, producing, nurturing work into the world—often without the practical protection I needed.

There was an Emperor problem: the world’s structures were not built for someone like me. Authority was offered to men first, and I could feel the door close with a soft, polite click.

There was a Lovers necessity: again and again, choosing fidelity to my real self over the approved self.

There was a Chariot struggle: pushing forward on little sleep, thin money, stubborn hope—walking through wet London streets, coat pulled tighter, mind rehearsing the next thing I could make that might be bought.

And then—history arrived like a Tower.

World War I cracked the world open. Whatever romance still clung to the old myths was scorched. The war machine made a mockery of Symbolist longing. After that, much of the art world demanded a different tone: harder, more direct, more socially bruised. The air itself felt altered—less perfume, more smoke.

I do not claim I adapted well. I wanted to sing of mythic depths and tides, but the world was now shouting about rubble.

Later, I found myself in a quieter Hermit season—less visible, more withdrawn, surviving by practical means. And yes, in the end, there is something like Judgment in my story—not because I became famous in my lifetime, but because the work outlived the conditions that diminished it. 

Someone turns over a card at a table long after you are gone, and your ink still speaks.

How I Want to Bless Your Tarot Practice

Now let me turn from my life to yours.

If you take nothing else from my story, take this:
Do not treat Tarot as a parlor trick.
Treat it as a practice of seeing.

A reading is a small stage where you rehearse truth. Sometimes the truth is gentle. Sometimes it is bracing. But the point is not performance; it is perception. It is the moment when the room grows still, the cards lie like small doors, and you feel—beneath all the chatter—what is real.

So now I will bless you in the old way—by naming what I hope you are given.

Pentacles blessing:

May your practice make you more honest about what you need in order to live.

Not just spiritually—materially. Rest. Money. Health. Structure. Help.

If a reading shows you the truth of your situation, let it lead you toward grounded action, not toward shame.

May you have enough—and know what enough is.

Wands blessing:

May Tarot strengthen your will to create a life that is actually yours.

Not a life performed for approval. Not a life lived on someone else’s timeline.

A life with real fire in it. Even a small flame is holy if it is true.

May your fire be yours.

Cups blessing:

May Tarot deepen your inner life without swallowing you in fantasy.

May it help you feel, grieve, long, love, release—so that your heart becomes more spacious rather than more crowded.

May your visions become nourishment, not anesthesia.

May your depths give you life.

Swords blessing:

May Tarot teach you clean truth.

Not cleverness mistaken for truth. Not cruelty disguised as honesty.

Clean truth: the kind that can cut through fog and leave you freer.

And if you must defend your dignity, may you do it without losing your soul.

May truth make you free.

Major Arcana blessing:

And then, one more blessing—the Major Arcana blessing:

May you consent to your initiations.

Not by forcing “growth.” Not by pretending everything happens for a reason.

But by noticing the thresholds when they appear—and choosing, when you can, to step through with integrity.

A Word to the Artist-Reader

If you are an artist—or even merely a person who senses the interior doorway into unknown countries—let me say something I care about strongly:

Do not copy me.

Learn from me, yes. Study what I did, certainly. But do not mistake imitation for devotion.

Paint what you love. Put your beloveds in your symbols. Put your landscapes into your archetypes. The only way to tell the universal truth is through particular forms, and the most potent particulars are the ones that have actually fed your own life.

That is how art becomes a bridge—how one person’s private album becomes another person’s revelation.

If my work has helped your work—if my little stage has become a stage for your own seeing—then that is enough. That is more than enough.

And when the scene is done, the stage is only paper again—but you are not. So lay down the cards. Take a breath. Feel the table under your hands. Look up from the ink and images at your actual life—the one waiting to be lived with more honesty, more courage, more tenderness, more truth.

And then begin again.

Yours in ink, image, and inward sight,

Pamela