We started season one by telling the story of the artist, woman, witch behind the world’s most famous tarot deck, Pixie Coleman Smith, and so it seems fitting that to spark season 2 we dig into the life of another spectacular and forgotten tarot artist. This queen, this Lady, in her sixties, as bombs rain down on london, dies her hair red and navigates the night streets between the lord’s of london, the world’s most famous magician and satanist, a feminist secret society, and a couple of young mathematicians drawing a new world with new geometry. Lady Frieda Harris walked this crooked path in order to summon the knowledge she needed to bring a bright new divination deck to light. And then she retired to India to live on a houseboat.
Lady Frieda Harris was perhaps the best friend The Beast Aleister Crowley ever had and she used her own art, financial resources and strength of character to convince him to collaborate with her. A project they thought would last months turned into years, and resulted in the luminous Thoth Tarot deck.
Works Cited
Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot, Lon Milo DuQuette 2003. Red Wheel / Weiser Books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleister_Crowley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-Freemasonry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Frieda_Harris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Harris
https://bbs.bapho.net/bbs/i-drive/ac-texts/ac/ac-fhnd1.asc
http://www.lupec.org/events/2003/tarot/fharris.html
http://www.parareligion.ch/dplanet/stephen/claas/olive_e.html
Projective Geometry and the Origins of the Dirac Equation Tom Pashby – /content/files/news/workshops/hq3/hq3_talks/25_pashby.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Adams_Kaufmann
Richard Kaczynski, “Projective Geometry in Early Twentieth Century Esoterism” in Mathematics in Popular Culture: Essays on Appearances in Film, Fiction, Games, Television and Other Media. Jessica K. Sklar, Elizabeth S. Sklar, McFarland, Jan. 10, 2014
