The Book of Thoth

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.

The Book of Thoth was published in 1944 as an issue of Crowley's serial The Equinox, in a small subscribers' edition, and it exists because of the deck. Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris had spent five years on the paintings, a project originally expected to take three months, and the book is his exposition of what the cards were built to carry.

Its contents are correspondences and argument rather than divinatory meanings. Crowley sets the trumps against the Hebrew letters, the elements, the planets and the zodiac following the Golden Dawn scheme he inherited, explains the changes he made to it, and defends each. The best known change concerns the letter Tzaddi and the trump named The Star, which the atlas treats on its Path entity, and the second is the renaming of several trumps.

The book also contains his method of divination with the deck, which is unusually demanding and is not the method most users of the cards employ.

Harris is properly a co author of the object even though her name is not on the spine, and the deck as it is actually used owes as much to her painting as to his scheme. She was still working on the plates when the book went to press.

The subscribers' edition was bound in Morocco leather and limited to two hundred copies, and Crowley did not live to see the deck itself printed. The cards were not published until 1969, more than twenty years after his death and Harris's work on them.