Lady Frieda Harris

Frieda Harris was born Marguerite Frieda Bloxam in London in 1877, married the barrister and later Liberal politician Percy Harris in 1901, and became entitled to style herself Lady Harris when he was created a baronet in 1932, though she generally preferred the fuller Lady Frieda Harris. Long before she met Aleister Crowley she was an active suffragette, an illustrator, a poet and an exhibited painter at venues including the New English Art Club, publishing some of her earlier esoteric writing and illustration under the deliberately absurd pseudonym Jesus Chutney, adopted, by her own account, so her work would be judged on its merits rather than on her title.

She met Crowley in the mid 1930s through Golden Dawn adjacent occult circles and, in 1938, proposed the project that would consume the rest of both their working lives: a new tarot deck, painted by her to Crowley's design, that would update the tradition's symbolism through his own Thelemic system rather than simply reproduce the Golden Dawn deck already in circulation. Harris funded Crowley's living and instruction throughout the collaboration, a material as well as artistic partnership without which the deck, by Crowley's own account, would not have been completed.

The collaboration ran from 1938 to 1943, with Harris producing multiple painted versions of several cards as Crowley refined his symbolic requirements, a process both later described as exhausting and occasionally acrimonious but never abandoned. Harris brought to the work her own serious study of projective geometry, color theory and the mathematics of perspective, and the finished cards are visually far denser and more abstract than any earlier tarot deck, layering geometric structure, alchemical and astrological symbolism and vivid color relationships that were substantially her own contribution rather than simply an illustrator's rendering of Crowley's instructions.

Neither Harris nor Crowley lived to see the project reach a wide public in finished form: Crowley's accompanying text, The Book of Thoth, was published in 1944 in a limited edition of two hundred copies, and Harris herself died in 1962 while traveling in Srinagar, in Kashmir, with the deck itself still unpublished as a standalone product; it did not reach general publication until 1969. Since then the Thoth Tarot has become one of the most widely used and imitated tarot decks in print, and Harris's original paintings, preserved at the Warburg Institute in London, are now recognized as a major work of twentieth century occult art in their own right rather than simply an accompaniment to Crowley's text.