A Waite-Smith Sea Change is Coming… 
ARIEL
(sings)
Full fathom five thy father lies.
Of his bones are coral made.
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell
The Tempest, William Shakespeare
Act. 1, Scene 2, Page 19
There is a sea change coming in the Tarot world. Marcus Katz and Tali Goodwin, noted Tarot scholars, will be publishing the Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot next month – April 2015. You can buy it here. The Waite-Smith Tarot (WS) is likely the most popular Tarot deck in the world, but it will never be viewed the same. Icons will be smashed! Prior interpretations of the cards will metamorphose.
Many Tarot readers will be upset to learn that the stock meanings and interpretations that they have learned for this deck’s images since the 1960s are not what the deck designers intended. They may also be surprised that the intent of many of the images were meant to illustrate the mystical views of Waite and occult teachings of the 19th century Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn rather than stretching back to the genesis of Tarot in Italy in the 1400s. The authors have been leaking out content for the past nine months and the new information is going to rock the Tarot world!
This popular, iconic deck was produced by Alfred Edward Waite with the assistance of Pamela Colman Smith in the early 1900s. The traditional attributes of the Tarot cards of the Tarot de Marseille from the 1700s and earlier were churned through the belief systems of Waite and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the early 1900s in the production of the WS deck.
Colman apparently worked with very little supervision by Waite in the artistic composition of the minors (pips) and clearly drew from her experience at Smallhythe Place in Kent, England where she stayed with actress Ellen Terry. She appears to have drawn upon her experiences with her companions during this time, perhaps visits to the British Museum in London to view the Sola Busca Tarot, her background in illustrating children’s’ stories, then current plays including productions of Shakespeare and her artistic background in the theater. Her apparent “queue sheet” for illustrating the minors was the esoteric “Book T” from the annals of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
You don’t have long to Waite! Change is coming!