Frieda Harris was born Marguerite Frieda Bloxam in London in 1877, married the barrister and later Liberal politician Percy Harris in 1901, and became entitled to style herself Lady Harris when he was created a baronet in 1932, though she generally preferred the fuller Lady Frieda Harris. Long before she met Aleister Crowley she was an active suffragette, an illustrator, a poet and an exhibited painter at venues including the New English Art Club, publishing some of her earlier esoteric writing and illustration under the deliberately absurd pseudonym Jesus Chutney, adopted, by her own account, so her work would be judged on its merits rather than on her title.
She met Crowley in the mid 1930s through Golden Dawn adjacent occult circles and, in 1938, proposed the project that would consume the rest of both their working lives: a new tarot deck, painted by her to Crowley's design, that would update the tradition's symbolism through his own Thelemic system rather than simply reproduce the Golden Dawn deck already in circulation. Harris funded Crowley's living and instruction throughout the collaboration, a material as well as artistic partnership without which the deck, by Crowley's own account, would not have been completed.