Under the moon’s waxing crescent in Gemini on the evening of June 9, 1937, Lady Frieda Harris, painter and wife of Liberal chief whip Percy Harris, attended a dinner at one of London’s private clubs. Tucked between 10 Downing Street and Buckingham Palace, the Royal Automobile Club, founded in 1897, is known for its 108 bedrooms, seven banquet rooms, three restaurants, full-size marble swimming pool, Turkish baths, billiard room, and squash courts. The London artists and socialites mingling on that cool summer evening included Clifford Bax, former co-editor of the literary and art magazine Golden Hind, and Greta Valentine, the bohemian painter and mystic. Rumor has it Aleister Crowley, England’s most infamous occultist, showed up as well, meeting the fifty-nine-year-old Harris for the first time.
Aleister Crowley, born into wealth in 1875 as the only child of Christian fundamentalists, grew up attending private school in Cambridge. Despite his excellent grades, he was expelled from several schools for misbehavior and left searching for direction, which he found in the study of the occult and mysticism. On November 18, 1898, he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society dedicated to occult and spiritual development. He became a prolific author of novels, poetry, and occult literature, publishing more than sixty books in his lifetime. His most influential writing sought to integrate the esoteric spiritual systems of the east and west, including the Kabbalah, the Upanishads, the I Ching, and astrology. Yet Crowley was notorious for repeatedly courting scandal among the high society in which he lived. In his partial autobiography The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, published in 1929 under the title The Spirit of Solitude, he openly embraced his role as a vulgar occultist by insulting Christians: “To declare oneself a follower of Jesus is not only to insult history and reason, but to apologize for the upholders of slavery and the suppressors of all free thought and speech.” Antagonizing his religious contemporaries, Crowley cultivated a reputation as a Satanist, practiced sex magic, and admitted to frequent heroin use.
Beginning with his initiation into the Golden Dawn, Crowley devoted himself to the study of the secret attributions of the Tarot. He found medieval tarot decks corrupted by religion and contemporary versions inadequate to convey the truth of the cards in a coherent system. Prior decks did not reveal the esoteric meanings of the Tarot. They were vehicles to introduce its mysteries or link them to Christianity, but never revealed the cards’ meaning in full, making it difficult to develop complex Kabbalistic lore around the decks. Crowley became fixated on publishing a comprehensive text on the Tarot. He wanted this text to be accompanied by an amended deck based on the principles of Thelemic mysticism, a philosophical system created by Crowley that encourages individuals to search for their true will and follow it. According to Thelemic thought, which borrows its primary gods from ancient Egyptian religion, the current age, the Aeon of Horus, is characterized by humanity aligning with the will of the universe. Crowley called this new age the New Aeon and saw it marked by a radical shift in human consciousness. He believed this new text and its tarot deck, which he planned to call the Thoth Tarot after the ancient Egyptian god associated with wisdom and magic, would aid those seeking to explore the new mysteries of the age.
On the evening Crowley met Harris, he immediately enlisted her help in manifesting the artistic end of this project.
Growing up in a wealthy, middle-class family, Lady Frieda Harris was taught only the arts—drawing, music, dancing—and conversational French. Though women were benefiting from expanded opportunities in the late nineteenth century, Harris’ education prepared her only for a good marriage. It also likely readied her for a life of being a voracious autodidact. After she left school, her interest in mysticism—incited, perhaps, by her mother reading her light texts about Buddhism at a young age and her father’s membership in the United Grand Lodge of England (England’s governing Masonic lodge for the majority of Freemasons)—carried her far beyond her traditional schooling. She read widely about alternative belief systems and became involved in theosophy and, briefly, Christian Science.
Above all, Harris committed herself to painting, which she also used as a springboard for further spiritual involvement. As an artist, Harris exhibited her work in prominent London galleries. There are rumors that she was a co-mason, a form of Freemasonry that admits female members, for whom she painted surreal Masonic trestle boards, the graphic teaching devices of Freemasonry. Her 1926 illustrated book Winchelsea: A Legend—which chronicles Dionysus’ imagined adventures in East Sussex—also reflects her interest in classical mythology and mysticism.
Three years before working with Crowley, Harris studied under two followers of Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian occultist and architect who founded the Waldorf education method. They taught her projective geometry, the study of the geometric relationship that emerges when projecting an image on another surface, and Harris learned to convert its mathematical concepts to the canvas. Her paintings became characterized by their arcs, nets, and swirls, allowing a central point to give a sense of infinite space. During this time, Harris also studied anthroposophy, a philosophy developed by Steiner that believes the human intellect has the capacity to contact spiritual worlds.
When Frieda married Sir Percy Harris in 1913, her husband encouraged her continued artistic pursuits. “My wife is an artist and a good one,” he wrote in the postscript of his 1948 memoir, Forty Years In and Out of Parliament. “She takes her art seriously, in fact works at her painting seven days a week and generally twelve hours out of the twenty-four. When, however, critics discover she is my wife she is immediately written down as an amateur and accordingly disparaged.” Frieda in turn supported Percy’s ambitions in Parliament: she joined his election campaigns, entertained their guests, ran his household, and involved herself in politics as a militant suffragist while he advocated for progressive legislative reforms. Their marriage was built on friendship and mutual admiration, but their relationship barely survived the years Frieda threw herself into painting an improved tarot deck. She was for some time willing to sacrifice her marriage for her artistic efforts, which perhaps accounts for her creative work’s demotion to an afterthought in her husband’s recollections of his life.
After her initial discussions with Crowley, Harris—who had no prior familiarity with the Tarot—began to read about the subject. She quickly understood that his knowledge exceeded anything previously presented in models and decks. Harris insisted that Crowley conceive entirely new versions of the traditional images, which she would illustrate, to accompany his book. Crowley refused, wanting only to “get hold of the best available old pack and have them redrawn with occasional corrections and emendations.” To persuade him, Harris offered to pay him a weekly stipend of two pounds to teach her magick (Crowley’s preferred spelling, wishing to differentiate his spiritual work from stage magic). Bankrupt, Crowley accepted. The two agreed to remain anonymous to potential backers throughout the project, in case Crowley’s scandalous reputation dissuaded sponsors or potential political allies of Harris’ husband.
Although Crowley envisioned the making of the Thoth Tarot to be a three- to six-month endeavor, the two worked on the project for more than five years.
In February 1938 Harris began studying under Crowley; in May he noted in his diary that she was “quite definitely a pupil.” Crowley taught Harris the Greek and Hebrew alphabets, the Kabbalah, the I Ching, astronomy and astrology, mysticism, divination, yoga, algebra, history, literature, and chemistry. In 1939 she relocated to her studio in Chipping Campden, ninety miles from London, in order to entirely devote herself to the project, leaving her husband in the care of their servants.
Though Tarot is commonly used as a tool to access the unconscious mind and gain insight into the patterns and influences that shape our lives, Harris was not interested in it as a tool for divination. Many years later, in 1954, she declined an invitation to discuss a “woman’s place in the New Aeon” on a lecture tour of women’s colleges in North America. “I am not the person to do it, being an artist with a simple understanding,” she wrote. “It is alarming to be faced with an audience of overeducated women, all anxious to have personal application of the meaning of the cards.”
Yet Harris was not merely “an artist with a simple understanding.” Her letters reveal a determination to internalize every nuance of the I Ching, her chosen text for studying divination. Both she and Crowley positioned themselves as outsiders to the circles they ran in, an affiliation that seemed to deepen their kinship. Harris may have been insecure about her lack of formal education, despite becoming one of the most well-educated women of her time, which made her reluctant to take on the role of interpreter for the generation of women receiving college degrees.
Harris’ dissatisfaction with her accredited qualifications could account, too, for her chosen professional name. Percy Harris did not become a baronet until 1932, thirty years after he married Frieda. The wife of a baronet becomes a “Lady,” but Frieda should have been known simply as “Lady Harris.” Lady Frieda Harris implies that she held the title through her own bloodline as the daughter of a duke rather than through marriage. Given her traditional education, she may have felt it was better to position herself as an aristocratic artist.
Although her claim to be just an artist doesn’t withstand scrutiny, Harris’ commitment to the Thoth Tarot was nonetheless maintained by her dedication to her craft and not by her interest in mysticism. “I do not love any of the Egyptian deities I try all the same,” she wrote to Crowley, acknowledging that she felt herself to be an inadequate pupil. It was for the sake of her art that she undertook the project.
Crowley, for his part, refused to accept Harris’ limited interest in the occult. In a 1939 letter to Crowley, Harris claims to have difficulty reading his books. Her tone reflects her exasperation with the rigorous study he expects of her. By then, their relationship was one of respect and comfort, and both were willing to tease or push the other further with the project:
In reference to your books—I suppose you know that most of them would be easier for a beginner written in Sanskrit & that anyone reading them would go off their heads. Therefore the wise (“like myself”) take them in snappy bits & only when they are feeling strong.
His reply came on December 19: “You can’t get out of it like that. I believe the basis of the feeling is that there should be a special prerogative to understand spiritual matters, a feeling of heirship.”
“I do not think the ritual of Magic is much good to me,” she replied. “I seem to have to draw everything I want to understand.” A year later, their argument was still not over. “I want to express everything in color and form and analysis does cramp the painter,” Harris wrote. She never stopped resisting the egoistic belief that she must see herself as an inheritor of magick. Neither fully understood the other’s commitment across the philosophical abyss between artist and occultist.
Using Crowley’s sketches and notes, Harris repainted some cards as many as eight times. She committed the deck to the occult and not to the traditional symbols (keys, cats, dogs, blindfolds) while infusing the images with her knowledge of projective geometry. Every painting was evidence not only of her dedication to her craft but also her willingness both to take interpretive risks and listen to Crowley’s demands. When she could not mail him her drawings, she would take a train to present him her latest portfolio, only for him to insist on more amendments. After Crowley realized Harris wanted to draw the characters of the Tarot without form or face, he insisted she tame this surrealist tendency. “This is metaphysics and not art,” he wrote. “I cannot believe that any of them will ever command either the Exeter, the Ajax, or the Achilles, and any man who is not potentially capable of doing that is not a man at all; he may be some kind of pudding, and I hold no brief against puddings, but all these people who resent simplicity resent manhood.” She must have had an endless well of patience.
With the deck under way, Lady Frieda Harris exhibited the paintings on at least four occasions: June 1941 at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford, March 1942 in Chipping Campden, July 1942 at the Berkeley Galleries on Davis Street in London, and August 1942 at the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours (now known as the Royal Watercolour Society) in London. These exhibitions were intended to sell the cards to subscribers and pay for their publication. Although the first exhibition withheld Harris and Crowley’s involvement, Harris’ artistry became an open secret, and she was invited to exhibit the cards pseudonymously in Chipping Campden. Both exhibits were presented with Crowley’s consent. In her characteristically direct yet rushed (and seemingly unedited and uninhibited) sentences, she explained to him why his name had to be omitted:
My business is to get money to publish these cards if possible & this is nearly impossible in the present war condition. I have been successful thro using what influence I possess in getting at people with money to come & see the exhibition. This is using my social position fully. If they suspected that the cards were inspired by the Arch Magician of Black Magic they would withdraw their patronage. I have had this conveyed to me politely & impolitely. Therefore if you come to the Private View or show up in any prominence this attempt to launch the cards is doomed & all the work & money lost. Can you be so large-minded & detached as to keep away until the thing is launched. I am trying to keep out too because I am bored by occult people, loathe commercialism, do not want fame or notoriety, do not want money, but yearn, long, desire for solitude. Any financial success will be yours. I have had my reward in the work.
However, when Harris arranged the Berkeley Galleries exhibit, she did so without Crowley’s permission and took credit for the artistry of the deck without acknowledging him or the Order. The pair, so impressed with what they accomplished, began belittling their partner’s contributions.
“She has no self-respect,” Crowley wrote in his diary on July 8, 1942. Harris wrote a friend that she held the show to establish her “claim as authorship, designer, and painter of the cards” because Crowley was planning to have them published by one of his secret societies. Harris feared that Crowley would not acknowledge her work: “He now says I did them to his design (heaven help me!) and talks as if I had been commissioned by him when the truth is the reverse.” The two decided to negotiate peace in writing. The list included three notable conditions: Harris could say she wrote The Book of Thoth (“I don’t care,” Crowley wrote), but Crowley’s scholarship must not be discredited, and the cards must not be issued only for fortune-telling. The two continued working, but by November Harris had to end Crowley’s stipend after their closeness led to a fight between her and Percy. The couple did not reconcile until May 1943.
The first printing of The Book of Thoth, financed by one of Crowley’s students, came in 1944 as a limited, numbered, and signed edition of two hundred copies with eight color plates of Harris’ cards hand-pasted in. Though the book wasn’t accompanied by a full deck—printing all the cards in color would have been prohibitively expensive—in the autobiographical note to The Book of Thoth, Crowley acknowledged that Harris’ artistry forced him to reckon with each card as an individual masterpiece. “She devoted her genius to the work,” he wrote. “With incredible rapidity she picked up the rhythm. May the passionate ‘love under will’ which she has stored in this treasury of truth and beauty flow forth from the splendor and strength of her work to enlighten the world; may this Tarot serve as a chart for the bold seamen of the New Aeon!” Crowley was now willing to acknowledge Lady Frieda Harris fully for her years of dedication to the project, to magick, and to him.
“How I should like to do them all again,” she wrote him.
The two remained devoted to each other until the end of Crowley’s life in 1947, and Harris was named a co-executor of his will. She hosted a wake in his honor at her home in London. By then Frieda kept a London residence separate from her husband, though the two still socialized and vacationed together. In a letter to an Order member on December 7, she wrote of Crowley, “I saw him the day he died, but he did not recognize me. I shall miss him terribly. An irreplaceable loss.” After Percy’s death in 1952, Frieda moved to a houseboat in Srinagar, in Kashmir “in search of a God,” making a modest income from writing and artistic projects, such as ballet designs. In a 1958 letter to a friend, she wrote that she still longed for Crowley, “who was so damned clever and without limitations.” She died four years later.
Harris was unsuccessful in her attempts to secure a publishing deal for a second edition of The Book of Thoth with the deck, in part because she rejected offers to print the cards in black and white. A color deck would not be printed until 1969, and it did not enjoy a professional-quality printing until 1977. Although neither Crowley nor Harris lived to see the deck printed, the Thoth Tarot survives as their legacy. The U.S. Games card box describes the Thoth Tarot as “a faithful reproduction of the seventy-eight cards originally painted by Lady Frieda Harris under the direction of Aleister Crowley.” Harris could not have done the project without Crowley’s guidance, but without her vision, we would not have the most comprehensive deck on the system of magick and astrology that informs the Tarot.