Golden Rider
Golden Rider-Waite variant for collectors seeking deep personal connection.
by Francois Tapernoux · 1996
Find a copy →We link out and never sell decks. Buying through links may earn us a small commission.
The record
After buying almost all versions of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, I finally found a deck that really speaks to me. I am an obsessive tarot collector and one of the drives of that obsession was the desire to find a way to connect with the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. I have a difficult relationship with this deck. I respect the ideas of this deck and I think Pamela Colman-Smith must have been an interesting character and a good artist but I have one problem with the RWS deck; I want to like it but I don't. I think the colours of the standard deck are hideous, the "original" Rider-Waite is too "washed out" and the Universal Waite, with colouring by Mary Hanson-Roberts is to watery for my taste. So I started to buy, use and love so-called Rider-Waite clones. The Golden Tarot by Kat Black was my favorite one but I also liked The Morgan-Greer, Tarot Illuminati, Aquarian, Hanson-Roberts and many other decks that stayed close to the RWS deck. Why I did so? I wanted to learn the Tarot studying the loads of literature that use the RWS to explain the symbolism of the tarot. I knew about the existence of the "Golden Rider" deck by Francois Tapernoux and I liked the pictures I had seen on line but I
The cards
