ALEISTER CROWLEY AND THE THOTH TAROT

Tarot is often presented as though it emerged from a forgotten temple, carrying intact fragments of an ancient magical doctrine.

Its documented history is different.

The earliest surviving Tarot cards belong to Renaissance Italy, where Tarot developed as a card game. The explicitly occult Tarot—the Tarot of correspondences, initiation, astrology, Kabbalah and ceremonial magic—was largely the product of later centuries.

Few decks demonstrate that transformation more completely than the **Thoth Tarot of Aleister Crowley and Frieda Harris**.

It is not an ancient Egyptian artefact.

It is a twentieth-century magical machine assembled from much older symbols.

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## FROM TAROCCHI TO OCCULT TAROT

The earliest surviving Tarot cards date from fifteenth-century northern Italy.

They were not originally accompanied by a secret manual explaining the Tree of Life, astrology, elemental correspondences or Egyptian mysteries. The association of Tarot with occult wisdom developed much later.

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European occultists increasingly interpreted the cards as remnants of ancient knowledge. Egyptian origins were proposed. Hebrew letters were connected with the Major Arcana. Tarot became associated with astrology, Kabbalah and ceremonial initiation.

Historically, these theories do not establish the ancient origin of Tarot.

But something important happened because of them.

Tarot ceased to be merely a deck of cards.

It became a **symbolic system**.

By the late nineteenth century, organisations such as the **Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn** had developed elaborate networks of correspondences linking Tarot with planets, zodiacal signs, elements, Hebrew letters and the Qabalistic Tree of Life.

This was the world inherited by Aleister Crowley.

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# ALEISTER CROWLEY

## TAROT AS A MAP OF THELEMA

Crowley did not simply design another Tarot deck.

He attempted to reinterpret Tarot through the philosophical and magical system of **Thelema**.

The result was the **Thoth Tarot**.

Crowley's collaborator was the artist **Lady Frieda Harris**, whose role was fundamental. Between approximately **1937 and 1943**, Harris produced the paintings from which the deck would eventually be created.

The project became far larger than originally intended.

Individual cards were reconsidered and repainted. Symbolic details, geometry, colour, planetary relationships and Qabalistic correspondences were repeatedly revised.

The surviving paintings demonstrate something easily forgotten when discussing the Thoth Tarot:

**the deck is the work of both an occultist and an artist.**

Crowley supplied an enormous conceptual structure.

Harris gave that structure visual existence.

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# THE BOOK OF THOTH

In **1944**, Crowley published *The Book of Thoth: A Short Essay on the Tarot of the Egyptians*.

The title deliberately participates in the old occult association between Tarot and Egypt.

It should not be read as evidence that the Tarot actually originated in ancient Egypt.

Instead, the book explains Crowley's interpretation of the cards and the system surrounding them.

Within it, Tarot becomes connected to:

**Thelema**

**Hermetic Qabalah**

**Astrology**

**Alchemy**

**Numerology**

**Ceremonial magic**

**The Hebrew alphabet**

**The Tree of Life**

and Crowley's interpretation of the **Aeon of Horus**.

The cards therefore operate on several levels simultaneously.

An image can be a Tarot trump.

It can also correspond to a Hebrew letter.

A path upon the Tree of Life.

An astrological force.

A magical formula.

And a Thelemic idea.

The deck is consequently less a sequence of isolated pictures than a network.

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# THE BOOK OF THOTH IS NOT THE THOTH TAROT

There is an important historical distinction.

Crowley's *Book of Thoth* appeared in **1944**.

The paintings already existed.

But the complete colour Tarot deck familiar today was **not commercially published during Crowley's lifetime**.

Crowley died in 1947.

Frieda Harris died in 1962.

The first commercial colour edition of the Thoth Tarot appeared only later.

This means that one of the most influential occult Tarot decks of the twentieth century largely achieved its enormous international audience **after the deaths of both people who created it**.

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# THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE DECK

Like traditional Tarot packs, the Thoth Tarot contains **78 cards**:

**22 Major Arcana**

and

**56 Minor Arcana**.

Crowley generally called the Major Arcana the **ATU**.

But several familiar names were deliberately altered.

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## VIII — ADJUSTMENT

Where many Tarot decks use **Justice**, Crowley used:

**ADJUSTMENT**

The change reflects more than vocabulary.

The card concerns equilibrium, balance and the continual adjustment of forces.

Nothing remains permanently balanced.

Balance must constantly be recreated.

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## XI — LUST

The traditional **Strength** becomes:

**LUST**

The imagery presents the Scarlet Woman riding the Beast.

Within Thelemic symbolism, Lust is not simply uncontrolled desire. It represents ecstatic participation in existence—energy accepted and directed rather than suppressed.

The card therefore becomes one of the clearest visual expressions of specifically Thelemic symbolism within the deck.

---

## XIV — ART

The traditional **Temperance** becomes:

**ART**.

Here opposites are not merely moderated.

They are combined.

Fire and water.

Male and female.

Different substances.

Different forces.

The image draws strongly upon alchemical symbolism.

The goal is transformation through union.

**SOLVE ET COAGULA.**

Dissolve and recombine.

---

## XX — THE AEON

The traditional **Judgement** becomes:

**THE AEON**.

This is one of Crowley's most significant alterations.

The card expresses his doctrine of successive magical and religious Aeons and the transition into the **Aeon of Horus** associated with Thelema.

The imagery therefore cannot be understood completely without reference to *The Book of the Law* and Crowley's wider religious system.

Here Tarot becomes a vehicle for Thelemic cosmology.

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## THE UNIVERSE

The final trump corresponds broadly to **The World** in many other Tarot systems.

But in the Thoth deck it becomes:

**THE UNIVERSE**

Completion is represented not simply as the end of a journey but as the integration of forces into a greater totality.

And because Tarot is cyclical, completion immediately contains the possibility of another beginning.

The Fool waits beyond the end.

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# THE FOOL

The Fool occupies a peculiar position.

Its number is:

**0**

Zero is absence.

But it is also unlimited possibility.

Before the first defined form appears, everything remains possible.

Crowley's Fool therefore contains an extraordinary density of symbolism: creative energy, movement, potential, divine madness and the moment before manifestation becomes fixed.

It stands outside ordinary sequence while simultaneously beginning it.

**0 precedes 1.**

Nothing precedes something.

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# THE MINOR ARCANA

One of the most important differences between the Thoth Tarot and many modern decks lies in its Minor Arcana.

The cards are organised into four suits:

**WANDS — FIRE**

**CUPS — WATER**

**SWORDS — AIR**

**DISKS — EARTH**

Crowley also gave the numbered cards descriptive titles.

Examples include:

**2 OF WANDS — DOMINION**

**3 OF CUPS — ABUNDANCE**

**5 OF CUPS — DISAPPOINTMENT**

**7 OF SWORDS — FUTILITY**

**10 OF DISKS — WEALTH**

These titles are not random keywords.

They emerge from the interaction of number, element, planetary attribution, zodiacal position and the inherited correspondence system that Crowley modified.

A card therefore cannot always be reduced to a simple definition such as:

“this card means success.”

Its meaning depends upon relationships.

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# THE COURT CARDS

Crowley also altered the familiar court structure.

The Thoth Tarot uses:

**KNIGHT**

**QUEEN**

**PRINCE**

**PRINCESS**

rather than the King, Queen, Knight and Page arrangement familiar from many other decks.

These figures represent combinations and expressions of elemental forces.

They can be interpreted psychologically, magically, symbolically or—within divination—as people and patterns operating within a situation.

Again, the important principle is relationship.

No symbol exists completely alone.

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# THE TREE OF LIFE

Behind much of the Thoth Tarot stands the Hermetic Qabalistic **Tree of Life**.

The ten numbered Minor Arcana can be related to the ten Sephiroth.

The twenty-two trumps correspond within the Hermetic system to the twenty-two paths connecting them.

The four suits introduce the elemental structure.

Astrological correspondences add another layer.

This creates a symbolic network in which Tarot becomes capable of representing a much larger magical cosmology.

A card can therefore be approached as an image.

A number.

An element.

A planet.

A zodiacal force.

A Hebrew letter.

A position within the Tree.

Or a combination of several of these simultaneously.

This is one reason the Thoth Tarot can appear extraordinarily complicated.

It was designed to be.

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# FRIEDA HARRIS

## THE WOMAN WHO GAVE THE THOTH TAROT ITS FORM

The visual power of the deck cannot be attributed to Crowley alone.

**Frieda Harris was not simply an illustrator hired to reproduce instructions.**

Her paintings transformed Crowley's dense system into a distinctive visual language of geometry, movement, colour and layered symbolic forms.

The project lasted years.

Some compositions went through repeated revisions. In one particularly striking example, Harris produced multiple versions of **The Magus** before the final design was accepted.

Her original paintings survive and have become important historical objects in their own right.

In 2025, the Warburg Institute in London displayed Harris's original Thoth paintings as part of its exhibition **Tarot — Origins & Afterlives**, placing the work within the wider six-hundred-year history of Tarot.

The exhibition made the historical relationship especially clear:

Tarot began as something very different.

Generation after generation transformed it.

Crowley and Harris were part of that continuing transformation.

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# DIVINATION OR INITIATION?

The Thoth Tarot can certainly be used for divination.

But treating it only as fortune-telling dramatically reduces what its creators attempted to construct.

Within the occult system surrounding the deck, Tarot can function as:

a contemplative device,

a symbolic language,

a map of correspondences,

a tool for meditation,

a record of magical philosophy,

and a visual representation of forces interacting with one another.

Whether those correspondences are understood as supernatural realities, psychological structures, artistic symbolism or historical products of Western esotericism depends upon the reader.

The historical deck itself does not settle that question.

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# THE GREAT MISUNDERSTANDING

Perhaps the greatest misunderstanding surrounding occult Tarot is the claim that its modern symbolic systems prove Tarot itself came from ancient Egypt, prehistoric mystery schools or a single primordial magical tradition.

The surviving historical evidence does not support that conclusion.

Tarot emerged in Renaissance Europe.

Its occult interpretation developed later.

But this does not make occult Tarot culturally insignificant.

Quite the opposite.

It reveals something more interesting.

Human beings repeatedly take inherited symbols and give them new structures.

Cards become allegories.

Allegories become correspondences.

Correspondences become magical systems.

And magical systems generate new art.

The Thoth Tarot is one of the clearest examples of that process.

It is not an archaeological remnant of ancient Egypt.

It is a modern synthesis created from centuries of esoteric material.

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# THE DECK AS A MACHINE OF SYMBOLS

A single Thoth card may contain references to mythology, astrology, Hermetic Qabalah, alchemy, Thelema, geometry and earlier Tarot traditions.

The result can initially appear chaotic.

But underneath the surface lies an attempt at structure.

Every symbol points toward another symbol.

Every correspondence opens another path.

Every path leads somewhere else.

This is perhaps the most useful way to approach the Thoth Tarot.

Not as seventy-eight isolated predictions.

But as **seventy-eight entrances into a larger symbolic labyrinth.**

And like every labyrinth—

the important question is not merely what lies at its centre.

It is what changes while you are trying to reach it.

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## HISTORICAL SOURCES & FURTHER EXPLORATION

**THE WARBURG INSTITUTE — TAROT: ORIGINS & AFTERLIVES**

A scholarly overview of Tarot's development from Renaissance card game to occult and artistic system, including Frieda Harris's original Thoth paintings.

[https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/news-events/events/tarot-origins-afterlives](https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/news-events/events/tarot-origins-afterlives)

**THE WARBURG INSTITUTE — TAROT EXHIBITION OVERVIEW**

[https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/news-events/news/tarot-origins-afterlives-opening-soon-warburg-institute](https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/news-events/news/tarot-origins-afterlives-opening-soon-warburg-institute)

**THE BOOK OF THOTH — WORLDCAT RECORD**

Bibliographic record for Crowley's 1944 *Book of Thoth*.

[https://search.worldcat.org/title/8478489](https://search.worldcat.org/title/8478489)

**FRIEDA LADY HARRIS — O.T.O. U.S. GRAND LODGE**

Historical account of Harris and the creation of the Thoth Tarot.

[https://oto-usa.org/usgl/lion-eagle/frieda-lady-harris/](https://oto-usa.org/usgl/lion-eagle/frieda-lady-harris/)

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### THE TAROT DID NOT EMERGE FROM ONE ANCIENT SECRET.

### IT BECAME OCCULT BECAUSE GENERATIONS OF PEOPLE TAUGHT THE CARDS TO SPEAK A NEW LANGUAGE.