Correspondences, and a Note on the Author

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.