Crowley's Tarot, and Lady Frieda Harris

The Book of Thoth (1944) is Aleister Crowley's detailed treatise on the tarot, written to accompany the Thoth deck he designed in collaboration with the artist Lady Frieda Harris, who painted the cards over some five years (1938-43) to Crowley's exacting and shifting instructions. The book reinterprets the seventy-eight cards through Kabbalah, astrology and Thelemic doctrine, and it renames several of the trumps, Justice becomes Adjustment, Strength becomes Lust, Temperance becomes Art, Judgement becomes The Aeon, to fit his system. It was issued in a small subscribers' edition under the imprint of the O.T.O., and both deck and book reached the wider market only after Crowley's death. The Thoth tarot is now, with the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, one of the two most widely used esoteric tarots, and the Book of Thoth is its authoritative companion; it belongs to the same Golden Dawn-derived tradition of tarot-Kabbalah correspondence that Crowley had earlier tabulated in Liber 777.