Frieda Harris
People · 3 min read · updated
Lady Frieda Harris (1877–1962) was a British painter who created the 78 paintings of the Thoth tarot with Aleister Crowley between 1938 and 1943. Crowley planned the symbolism; Harris designed and painted the cards, often several times over, and brought in ideas of her own from projective geometry and modern art. Neither lived to see the deck printed: it was first published as a full deck in 1969, and it is now, after the Rider–Waite–Smith, the most influential tarot of the 20th century.
- Known for
- Painting the Thoth tarot
- Worked with
- Aleister Crowley, 1938–1943
- Paintings
- 78 cards, several in more than one version
- First shown
- Exhibitions in Oxford and London, 1942 and 1944
- Deck first printed
- 1969, seven years after her death
- Husband
- Sir Percy Harris, Liberal MP
Who was Frieda Harris?
She was born Marguerite Frieda Bloxam in London, the daughter of a surgeon, and in 1901 married Percy Harris, who became a Liberal member of Parliament and, in 1932, a baronet; that is why she is Lady Harris. She trained as a painter, illustrated books and was drawn to spiritual movements, including Co-Freemasonry and the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, whose followers taught a projective geometry she later used in her art.[1]
How did she come to paint the Thoth tarot?
Harris met Aleister Crowley in 1937, when he was in his sixties and short of money. She asked him to teach her magic, and he asked her to paint a tarot. He expected the job to take three months, copying traditional designs; it took five years, because Harris pushed him to rethink every card, and he answered with long letters of instruction, which she then reworked in her own style.[1]
She paid him a weekly stipend during the work, which kept him going through the war years. Their letters show a real collaboration: Crowley set the symbols and the ; the faceted planes, the rays and the colour that make the deck look the way it does are hers.
What is special about her paintings?
- Projective geometry. Many cards are built from intersecting arcs, spirals and crystal-like planes, drawn from the geometry she studied.
- Colour scales. Crowley gave her the Golden Dawn's four colour scales, and she used them on every card.
- Modern style. The paintings borrow from Art Deco, Cubism and Futurism, which makes the deck look nothing like the woodcut tarots before it.
- More than one version. She painted several cards two or three times, and some alternate versions survive.
Crowley wrote the deck's book, The Book of Thoth, published in 1944 with small black-and-white plates of the paintings.[2] In it he thanked her warmly as the artist who had brought the cards to life.
Why was the deck published so late?
The paintings were shown in Oxford in 1942 and at a London gallery in 1944, but wartime paper shortages and the cost of colour printing kept the deck from print. Crowley died in 1947. Harris was widowed in 1952, moved to India, and died in Srinagar in 1962. The first full colour edition appeared in 1969. The original paintings are now held by the Warburg Institute in London. See Thoth tarot.
Her place in tarot history
For decades the deck was sold as Crowley's, with Harris as a footnote, much as Pamela Colman Smith was left off the box of the Rider–Waite. Since the 1990s writers and exhibitions have given her the credit of a co-creator. The Thoth is still read by people who never open The Book of Thoth, and what they are reading is, first of all, her pictures.