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The Thoth Tarot
The Thoth Tarot is the deck designed by the English occultist Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) and painted by the artist Lady Frieda Harris (1877–1962). It sets out the Golden Dawn's system of correspondences — Hebrew letters, planets, signs, elements, the Tree of Life — more openly and more densely than any deck before it, with changes of Crowley's own. After the Rider–Waite–Smith deck it is the most influential tarot of the twentieth century in the English-speaking world, and the two are often seen as the two great descendants of the Golden Dawn.
How it was made
Crowley had been a member of the Golden Dawn in its last years before the Order split, and later founded his own religious and magical system, Thelema. In 1937 he was introduced to Frieda Harris, a painter with a keen interest in esoteric thought, and in 1938 the two began work on a tarot. It was meant to take a few months; it took five years. Harris painted, Crowley criticised and explained, and she repainted — some cards several times — until 1943. Her paintings were shown in London in 1942. Crowley's book on the deck, The Book of Thoth, appeared in 1944 in a small edition with some of the cards reproduced in it.
Neither of them saw the deck printed as cards. Crowley died in 1947 and Harris in 1962. Small single-colour printings made from the book's plates circulated in the 1960s, and the first full-colour edition from the paintings, overseen by Crowley's successors in the order he had led, appeared around 1969; accounts differ by a year or two over the first edition.
What is different
The deck keeps the Golden Dawn's structure — the twenty-two Major Arcana on the paths of the Tree, the numbered cards on the decans of the zodiac — but renames and reorders several cards:
- Justice becomes Adjustment and Strength becomes Lust; Crowley returned them to the older numbers, Adjustment VIII and Lust XI, while keeping the Golden Dawn's signs for them (Libra and Leo).
- Temperance becomes Art, Judgement the Aeon, The World the Universe, The Magician the Magus and the Wheel of Fortune simply Fortune.
- Following a line of his own Book of the Law — "Tzaddi is not the Star" — Crowley exchanged the Hebrew letters of The Emperor and The Star, while the Emperor stays Aries and the Star Aquarius.
- The suits are Wands, Cups, Swords and Disks, and the court cards are Knight, Queen, Prince and Princess — the Golden Dawn's ranks, with the mounted Knight in the King's place.
Every numbered card bears a one-word title, taken in shortened form from the Golden Dawn's own titles: the Two of Cups is "Love", the Three of Swords "Sorrow", the Ten of Swords "Ruin". The pips show their suit signs in geometric arrangements against coloured fields rather than scenes, so a reader leans on the title, the colours and the astrology.
How it is read
Readers of the Thoth deck often work through its correspondences: the planet and sign behind a numbered card, the element of a court, the path of a trump. Crowley's book does not much encourage reversed cards; many Thoth readers instead weigh neighbouring cards by elemental dignity, as the Golden Dawn did. The deck's titles and its imagery are also bound up with Crowley's religious teaching, which some readers take up and many simply set aside.
Golden Dawn, Waite and Crowley
The Rider–Waite–Smith deck and the Thoth deck come from the same Order and differ in temper. Waite kept the system veiled under traditional-looking pictures; Crowley put it on the surface and changed it where he thought the Order had been wrong. A card's meaning in one deck is therefore not always its meaning in the other, and no deck's scheme is the only correct one.