The Book of Thoth

The Book of Thoth : A Short Essay on the Tarot of the Egyptians is the title of The Equinox, volume III, number 5, by English author and occultist Aleister Crowley. The book is recorded in the vernal equinox of 1944 (an Ixviii Sol in 0° 0' 0" Aries, March 21, 1944 e. v. 5:29 p.m.) and was originally published in an edition limited to 200 numbered and signed copies.

This book describes the philosophy and the use of Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot, a deck of Tarot cards designed by Crowley and co-designed and painted by Lady Frieda Harris. The Thoth Tarot has become one of the best-selling and most popular Tarot Decks in the world.

Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

Both Aleister Crowley and scholastic mystic Arthur Edward Waite were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. By 1909 Waite, influenced by the work of Eliphas Levi, had already published the Rider-Waite tarot deck drawn by artist Pamela Colman Smith. In 1910 his Pictorial Key to the Tarot was published with 78 black-and-white plates of each card in a deck which included the appropriate explanation.^[1]

By 1944, Crowley would match the pace in scholarship set by Waite in 1909. At the same time he would expand upon it by extending the field into Oriental philosophy, Middle Eastern practices, and Western science including Relativity.^{[citation needed]}

Contents

The book is divided into four major parts:

• Part One: The Theory Of The Tarot.
• Part Two: The Atu (Keys or Trumps).
• Part Three: The Court Cards.
• Part Four: The Small Cards.

Part One is further divided into three chapters; Part Two into two chapters and an appendix; Part Three into one chapter; and Part Four into one chapter. The book includes a list of plates depicting the Tarot cards as seen by Crowley and Harris.

There is an Appendix A: the use of the Tarot in the Art of Divination; and an Appendix B which includes the obiter dictum: "the 'correspondences' are not arbitrary". Appendix B also includes the Key Scale of the Tree of Life with the conic sections of mathematics and a diagram attributing the trigrams of the I Ching to the ten Sephirot.

Editions

• U.S. Games Systems, Inc., October 1977. ISBN 0-913866-12-1
• Weiser Books, June 1981. ISBN 0-87728-268-4

See also

• The Book of Thoth of Egyptian mythology
• Magick
• Thelema
• Works of Aleister Crowley

Notes

Further reading

• The Crowley Tarot: The Handbook to the Cards, by Akron & Hajo Banzhaf. U.S. Games Systems, Inc. August 1995. ISBN 0-88079-715-0
• Keywords for the Crowley Tarot, by Hajo Banzhaf & Brigitte Theler. Weiser Books, July 2001. ISBN 1-57863-173-4
• Tarot: Mirror of the Soul: Handbook for the Aleister Crowley Tarot, by Gerd Ziegler. Weiser Books, January 1988. ISBN 0-87728-683-3
• Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot, by Lon Milo Duquette. Weiser Books, November 2003. ISBN 1-57863-276-5