The Thoth Deck's First Printing in 1969

The Thoth deck 1969 printing finally put Lady Frieda Harris's paintings into readers' hands as cards, not framed pictures. The gap between finished artwork and finished product had stretched across three decades: Harris completed the paintings by the early 1940s, showed them publicly in the exhibitions covered in The 1942 Exhibitions of the Thoth Paintings, and died in 1962 without seeing a commercial deck reach a shop shelf.

Aleister Crowley himself had died in 1947, also without a printed deck. His manuscript The Book of Thoth, finished around 1944, appeared that year only in a small, limited edition produced by his own order, illustrated with black-and-white plates rather than full colour reproductions of Harris's work. For a generation, anyone wanting to see the cards in colour had to track down an exhibition catalogue, a private print, or the paintings themselves.

That generation included serious students of the Golden Dawn's surviving papers, who knew the deck mainly through Crowley's dense written correspondences rather than through any image. A reader in, say, 1955 could study the astrology and Hebrew letter attributions of a card like the Hierophant in prose, yet have no legal way to see how Harris had actually painted it. The text circulated; the pictures largely did not.

Why it took so long

Printing seventy-eight full-colour cards accurately, in a single run, was an expensive proposition for any publisher in the 1940s and 1950s, let alone one tied to a figure as commercially risky as Crowley. His reputation in the British press, built on decades of scandal reporting, made mainstream publishers cautious, and the custody of Harris's original paintings after her death added a further complication: securing rights and physical access to seventy-eight irreplaceable artworks is not a quick negotiation. Specialist occult publishers existed, but a project of this scale needed both money and technical colour-printing capacity that most small presses lacked.

Colour lithography good enough to carry Harris's layered washes and fine pencil underdrawing was itself a developing technology through the mid-century decades. A rushed or underfunded print run risked flattening exactly the detail that made the paintings worth reproducing in the first place: the subtle gradations she built through her projective-geometry method would have printed as flat blocks of colour on cheaper equipment, losing the very quality that set the cards apart from a standard printed deck.

The thoth deck 1969 edition

By most accounts, a small specialist press produced the first limited colour printing of the deck around 1969, decades after the paintings were finished and years after both creators had died. It was a modest run by later standards, aimed at an audience that already knew Crowley's and Harris's reputations rather than at a mass market. The cards followed Harris's compositions as closely as period colour-printing technology allowed, though early printings could not fully match the subtlety of her original watercolour and gouache layering.

From limited edition to standard deck

Wider commercial distribution followed over the subsequent decade, as Samuel Weiser and later U.S. Games Systems brought the deck into regular print and paired it more consistently with Crowley's Book of Thoth as a packaged set. That pairing shaped how generations of readers encountered the cards: text and image together, as Crowley had originally intended but never lived to arrange himself. Today's standard commercial edition, familiar to most readers of The Tower or the Princess of Disks, descends directly from that run rather than from Harris's original paintings, which remain in institutional keeping.

What the delay changed

A deck published in 1943, had circumstances allowed it, would have entered a tarot market still dominated by the Rider-Waite-Smith model and card-game decks like the French Tarot de Marseille lineage. Arriving instead in 1969, the Thoth deck met a very different audience: a counterculture already receptive to esoteric revival, soon to fuel the broader tarot boom this series' final part covers. The decades of delay, often framed as a tragedy for Harris and Crowley personally, arguably positioned the deck for a readership far more willing to engage with its dense astrological and Thelemic symbolism than the public of the 1940s would have been.

Reading the deck today

Modern readers inherit a system built from Golden Dawn correspondences that Crowley and Harris reworked over five years of painting and three decades of waiting, a lineage From the Golden Dawn to Waite and Crowley: Two Heirs, Two Decks traces from its roots. Every printed copy of the Thoth deck today is, in a real sense, a late arrival to its own era: a 1940s artwork finally meeting a 1970s audience, and continuing to find new ones since.

That late arrival also means the deck skipped the mid-century decades when esoteric publishing was at its most cautious and reached print instead at a moment when readers actively wanted denser, stranger symbolism than the mainstream decks offered. A delay that looked, to Harris and Crowley, like professional failure reads in hindsight as unusually good timing for the deck itself, even if neither of them lived to call it that.

For background on the deck's publication history and editions, see the Wikipedia article on the Thoth Tarot.