Thoth

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.

The Thoth deck is the most heavily systematised of the four recorded here: every card carries astrological, Kabbalistic, elemental and alchemical attributions drawn from the framework Crowley set out in Liber 777, itself derived from the Golden Dawn's tables, and the court cards, suits and decan attributions are all built into the imagery. For readers who work with correspondences it is the most information-dense deck in common use, and for readers who do not it is the most opaque. A note about the author belongs here. Crowley was a significant figure in the history of western esotericism and an accomplished writer on it; he also expressed racist and antisemitic views in his published work and behaved destructively toward a number of people in his life. The atlas records his contribution to the material without endorsing him, and readers should meet the work knowing both.

The Thoth deck's court cards depart from the standard Page-Knight-Queen-King structure common to the Marseille and Rider-Waite-Smith patterns alike, renaming them Princess, Prince, Queen and Knight, a restructuring built into Crowley's own Golden-Dawn-derived elemental and astrological system rather than a stylistic choice independent of it. The deck's first print run in 1969 was a small, expensive limited edition; the widely available boxed edition most modern readers actually own was published considerably later, in 1978, by US Games Systems, the same American publisher responsible for popularising the standard commercial Rider-Waite-Smith edition, making 1978 the year the Thoth deck actually reached a mass audience rather than the remaining small circle of Crowley's own followers.