Recasting Rider Waite Smith's Cast, Not Its Scenes

The Modern Witch Tarot recasts the Rider Waite Smith deck's seventy eight card structure with an entirely contemporary, racially diverse cast of women and nonbinary figures in place of the historical deck's own cast, while following that deck's card sequence and scene composition closely rather than departing from it. Illustrated by Lisa Sterle with a foreword by Vita Ayala, it was published by Sterling in 2019 and reads upright and reversed under the Golden Dawn and Rider Waite Smith trump order, Strength at eight and Justice at eleven.

Where several decks in this catalogue rename suits or invent new settings, Modern Witch Tarot changes only who appears in each scene, keeping the pose, composition and symbolic objects of the 1909 original recognisable card by card while replacing its cast. That close adherence to an existing deck's scene by scene composition, updating who is depicted without altering what is depicted, is a narrower kind of revision than Next World Tarot's looser adaptation of Rider Waite Smith's divinatory structure into contemporary punk and immigrant imagery, or Deviant Moon Tarot's wholly invented setting rather than a reworked existing one.

The deck's title places it in a small cluster of decks using witch in their name published within a few years of each other, alongside Everyday Witch Tarot from Llewellyn in 2017, though the two share no other connection. Everyday Witch Tarot follows a cast of different witches through entirely new scenes of ordinary modern life, while Modern Witch Tarot keeps Rider Waite Smith's own scenes intact and updates only who is shown standing inside them.