Thoth Tarot
The Thoth Tarot is the deck designed by the English occultist Aleister Crowley and painted by Lady Frieda Harris between 1938 and 1943. Crowley's book of commentary, The Book of Thoth, was published in 1944 in a limited edition of 200 copies. The deck itself was not printed in colour until 1969. It is the most ambitious occult tarot of the 20th century and the principal alternative to the Rider-Waite-Smith deck.
Origin
Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was a former member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the founder of his own magical order Argenteum Astrum, and one of the most controversial figures in modern Western esotericism. By the late 1930s, living in poverty in England, Crowley conceived the Thoth Tarot as the culminating expression of his system of "Thelemic" magic, a synthesis of Kabbalah, Egyptian iconography, astrology, and the New Aeon doctrines of his Book of the Law (1904). He commissioned Lady Frieda Harris (1877-1962), a wealthy aesthete and trained artist, to paint the cards.
Harris approached the project with extraordinary seriousness, painting many cards multiple times to satisfy Crowley's exacting symbolic demands. The collaboration was fraught: Harris was the patron and the artist, Crowley the impecunious magus, and their letters reveal years of negotiation over each detail. Originally intended as a small project, the deck expanded into seventy-eight cards over five years. Harris exhibited the originals in Oxford in 1942 and London in 1942 to acclaim. Crowley died in 1947 without seeing the deck mass-printed; Harris continued to safeguard the originals until her death in 1962. The first widely available colour edition appeared in 1969.
What makes it distinctive
The Thoth Tarot encodes the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn's system of correspondences with greater explicitness than any other deck. Each Major Arcana bears a Hebrew letter and an astrological glyph; each numbered Minor Arcana displays a planetary symbol and a zodiacal decan; the elemental attributions of suits and ranks are explicitly marked. Crowley renamed several trumps (Justice becomes "Adjustment", Strength becomes "Lust", Temperance becomes "Art", Judgement becomes "The Aeon", The World becomes "The Universe") and renumbered Strength and Justice in the Golden Dawn order.
Lady Frieda Harris's art is mathematically rigorous. She studied projective geometry under the influence of Rudolf Steiner and used geometric construction in many cards: the Aeon's overlapping triangles, the Hierophant's nested pentagrams, the Star's spiral wave. The Thoth Minors are not scenic in the Smith manner but symbolic and abstract, with each card showing the suit emblem in a configuration that encodes its astrological decan. Crowley provided keywords for each numbered Minor: Two of Wands "Dominion", Five of Cups "Disappointment", Eight of Swords "Interference", Ten of Disks "Wealth".
In practice
The Thoth Tarot is the deck of choice for readers committed to ceremonial-magical interpretation. It rewards study of The Book of Thoth, of Crowley's Liber 777 (a table of correspondences), and of the wider Golden Dawn-Thelemic literature. Beginners often find the Thoth deck overwhelming, but readers who have first mastered the Rider-Waite-Smith deck tend to enjoy the Thoth's greater depth. Its court ranks (Knight, Queen, Prince, Princess) differ from Rider-Waite (King, Queen, Knight, Page), and its Minor Arcana keywords differ as well; both differences must be learned.
For spreads, the Thoth deck works in any standard layout: Celtic Cross, three-card, year-ahead. Crowley's preferred layout was the "Tree of Life Spread", in which 11 cards are placed at the ten Sephiroth of the Kabbalistic Tree plus a synthesis card, but this requires Kabbalistic familiarity. For daily card-of-the-day work the Thoth deck is wonderful: each card is dense enough to repay days of meditation. Its art also rewards study as art, independently of any divinatory use.
Symbolic depth
The Thoth Tarot belongs to the New Aeon doctrine that Crowley announced in 1904 with the reception of Liber AL vel Legis, the Book of the Law. Crowley believed that humanity was passing from the Aeon of Osiris (the dying-and-rising god of patriarchal monotheism) into the Aeon of Horus (the crowned and conquering child, the new humanity). The Thoth deck encodes this transition: Judgement becomes "The Aeon", showing Nuit, Hadit, and Horus rather than the Christian angel of resurrection; the Lust card (XI) shows Babalon riding the Beast in ecstatic union rather than a chaste maiden subduing a lion.
For all its grandeur, the Thoth deck remains controversial. Crowley's personal life was scandalous, his politics troubling, his magical writings sometimes sinister. Lady Frieda Harris's art transcends much of this, and many modern readers separate the deck from its author's biography. Whatever your view of Crowley, the Thoth Tarot is one of the great achievements of 20th-century esoteric art and it remains an indispensable reference for any serious student of the tarot. Visit the glossary for individual Major Arcana entries and the tarot hub for Thoth reading tutorials.
Also known as
- Crowley Tarot
- Crowley-Harris Tarot
- Book of Thoth Tarot
- Thelemic Tarot
- Aeon Tarot