Reviews

“The Lady and the Beast is a much-needed book devoted to artist Frieda Harris, especially her years-long collaboration with Aleister Crowley on the Thoth Tarot. The culmination of Deja Whitehouse’s decade of painstaking work… this is the most complete portrait to date of Harris and her Herculean accomplishment: a collection of 78 paintings that continues to resonate and influence Tarot to this day, second in popularity only to the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. The Lady and the Beast is a milestone in the history of the Thoth Tarot, and an antidote to entrenched misunderstandings around its creation.”

Dr Richard Kaczynski

“There’s been a lot of writing about Aleister Crowley, of course, which varies from sober and detailed accounts to wildly speculative sensationalism making the most of the so-called ‘Wickedest Man Alive’ in his times. But there’s been next to nothing about his partner in the tarot deck creation, Frieda Harris.

This volume does a lot to remedy that lack… For the first time we get a sense of the artist, her milieu, and the collaboration, which was very clearly a momentous undertaking for both occultists…

A marvellous and fun read for anyone interested in the history of contemporary magic, modern art in Britain, and especially of course in Tarot. Frieda Harris is a delightful subject, passionately attached to her occult studies and widely interested in all the possibilities her time offered as the new modernity.”

Kate Laity, PhD, University of Connecticut

“The Lady and The Beast is a fantastic book that covers a lot of ground, publishing for the first time academic research that gives us an invaluable resource for historians and esotericists alike. It is an academic book but written in a way that is meant to be inclusive. It’s perfect, of course, for anyone interested in just about anything to do with Frieda, Lady Harris, but also for the political and social history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the esoteric and artistic community that surrounded Harris and Crowley.”

Gwen Enstam, Tarot Association of Britain and International Forum

“The Lady and the Beast sets Crowley and his pseudo-system in conversation with a brilliant contemporary. …Whitehouse is a profoundly knowledgeable scholar of the occult, and guides her initiates, with neither pretension nor condescension, through its manifold and viperish complexities.”

Sam Quill, Times Literary Supplement

“The Lady and the Beast is a meticulously researched and eloquently argued work that illuminates the intersections of gender, art, and occult modernity. It is undoubtedly an essential reading for scholars of Western esotericism.”

Andrej Kapcár, Religious Studies Review

“Whitehouse provides intriguing insights into Harris’s later years in India, where she passed away, making this a comprehensive study of one of the lesser-known women in 20th-century esotericism.”

Phil Baker, Fortean Times

“In ‘The Lady and the Beast’ Deja Whitehouse’s researches into letters and diaries, as well as secondary sources, has generated a fascinating insight into the life of Lady Frieda Harris (1877-1962) and her friendship/artistic collaboration with Aleister Crowley on the Thoth tarot deck…

It seems that for Harris, finding her independence as both an occultist and an artist – from both her marriage to Percy Harris (a senior Liberal politician) and from the other demands of her role as a mother – was a constant struggle.   She employed a pseudonym – the wonderful Jesus Chutney – to provide a degree of anonymity and to maintain social respectability while exhibiting her work. 

Her collaboration with Crowley brought both liberation and conflict of its own, arguably contributing to the breakdown of her marriage and, inevitably, clashes with AC’s own immense personality and will.  It is through her dealings with the latter that we see Harris’s irreverent sense of humour and her determination to assert her own independence.  I expect many people will come to this seeking insight into the production of the Thoth deck, Crowley’s final project, and yet, while the chapters detailing Harris’s rocky relationship with the cantankerous mage are very entertaining, there is so much more to be found in the biography of this remarkable woman.”

Carl Taylor