The Thoth deck was painted by Lady Frieda Harris to the direction of Aleister Crowley between 1938 and 1943, on a commission the two of them expected to take about three months. Harris, an artist working in a projective-geometry-influenced style associated with Anthroposophy, repainted several cards many times at Crowley's insistence, and the finished work is markedly more modernist than any earlier tarot. Crowley wrote the accompanying book, The Book of Thoth, published in 1944 in a limited edition. Neither of them lived to see the cards published as a working deck: Crowley died in 1947, Harris in 1962, and the deck was first issued in 1969. It renames several trumps, calling Strength Lust, Temperance Art, Judgement the Aeon and the World the Universe, and rebuilds the correspondences around Crowley's Thelemic system.
Frieda Harris's painting style is often described as owing something to the geometric compositional theory known as Dynamic Symmetry, developed by the artist and theorist Jay Hambidge in the early twentieth century and built on proportional grids derived from classical Greek design, which shaped the precise, faceted, almost crystalline look of many Thoth cards. Crowley's insistence on repeated repainting extended in some documented cases to a dozen or more versions of a single card before he judged it correct, a level of authorial control over the finished image that exceeds anything recorded of Pamela Colman Smith's comparatively freer hand in executing the Rider-Waite-Smith deck three decades earlier.