Pamela Colman-Smith (affectionally known as Pixie) the daughter of an American merchant from Brooklyn, Charles Edward Smith and his Jamaican wife Corinne Colman, hence Colman-Smith.[via.link] Charles Smith’s family was in trade and law, with interests in art and collecting. He was related to the actor, William Gillette, through whom PCS may have met Ellen Terry and the rest of the theatre crowd. Corinne Colman’s family was artistic and mystical, with several notable painters. Corinne herself was a parlor actress. All the women in her family seem to be named Pamela, Pamelia, or Corinne which makes things difficult to sort out. In 1901, PCS joined the The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult society. William Butler Yeats and Arthur Edward Waite were also members, along with Aleister Crowley and a host of others. PCS took the motto of Quod tibi id alliis, whatever you would have done to thee, do unto others. Also in this year, Queen Victoria died and Edward VII became king. Society changed radically as a breath of fresh air blew in and removed so many of the restraints and habits of the previous times. Around the early 1900s, PCS begins to have visions and paint her ‘music paintings.’ She was gifted with a high degree of synaesthesia – she saw music and was able to transmit those visions into tangible artworks. Synaesthesia is a crossing-over of sensory input. You hear colors or see music or smell words and so on. We all have this to some extent. It is part of our memory and recall process. PCS developed this synaesthesia to a high degree and her work is compelling, not for the actual images but for what they imply. Reading the titles to her various paintings, you are forced to wonder where in the piece of music she found the images she did. And, also wonder, what else she saw that did not make it onto the page. She embodied the Symbolist ideal in this area. [via.link] She is best known for designing the Rider-Waite-Smith deck of divinatory tarot cards for Arthur Edward Waite. [via.link]