A prince once broke into a tomb to steal a book written by Thoth, the god of writing. He took it, read it, and then the ghost of the book’s first owner rose to demand it back. The Book of Thoth is not one book. The name covers a legendary Egyptian grimoire, a Demotic wisdom text, and Crowley’s 1944 tarot commentary.
One name, three books: the legendary grimoire of the Setne story, a Demotic wisdom dialogue, and Crowley’s 1944 tarot companion. Here is what each one is.
Which Book of Thoth do you mean?
Three different things carry the name, and each demands a different answer.
For Egyptologists, the Book of Thoth begins as a story. A Demotic papyrus now in Cairo, Papyrus Cairo 30646, tells how a prince named Setne (SET-neh) searched the tombs of Memphis for a book written in the god’s own hand. Egyptologists also attach the same title to Papyrus Vienna D 6951, a real Demotic dialogue between a disciple and a master about sacred knowledge, published in 2005 as The Ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth by Richard Jasnow and Karl-Theodor Zauzich.
For occultists, the Book of Thoth means the 1944 volume by Aleister Crowley, subtitled A Short Essay on the Tarot of the Egyptians. It is the companion to the Thoth Tarot, the 78-card deck Crowley designed and Lady Frieda Harris painted.
All three versions share one claim: a complete symbolic knowledge of the world can be written down. The Egyptian myth adds the warning, repeated in every copy of the tale: the gods do not lend that knowledge for free.
Where the name comes from: an Egyptian myth written on papyrus
The oldest layer belongs to Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing, reckoning, and judgment. The Egyptians called him Djehuty (je-HOO-tee), and his cult city was Khemenu, which the Greeks renamed Hermopolis Magna, the city of the Eight. Scribes invoked him before writing, because he was the one who kept words true.
The famous story is “Setne Khamwas and Naneferkaptah,” sometimes called Setne I. The papyrus dates to the Ptolemaic period (305 to 30 BCE), but the tale is set in the reign of Ramesses II (1279 to 1213 BCE), and its hero is a historical figure: prince Khaemweset, high priest of Ptah at Memphis, remembered for restoring ancient monuments and sometimes called the first Egyptologist. In the story, Setne learns of a book containing two spells, hidden in the tomb of a prince named Naneferkaptah. One spell lets the reader understand the speech of every bird, beast, and reptile, and follow the movements of the sky. The other lets the reader see Re, the sun god, sailing in his barque with his entourage.
The book was sealed in nested caskets of iron, bronze, wood, ivory and ebony, silver, and gold, one inside another. Naneferkaptah had paid for it with his life: he, his wife Ahwere, and his son Merib drowned after the gods punished him for taking it. Setne steals the book anyway. Naneferkaptah’s ghost rises from his coffin, humiliates Setne in a public contest, and Setne ends the tale carrying the book back to the tomb.
The moral is dry and practical: writing is power, but only sanctioned power is safe. Scribes kept copying this warning for centuries, while they themselves copied every book they were allowed to touch.
A second text shares the name, and it changes the picture. Papyrus Vienna D 6951 is a Demotic dialogue from the Graeco-Roman period in which a student questions a master about the House of Life, the temple scriptorium where priests were trained. The 2005 edition gave it the scholarly title The Ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth. It is an initiation text of questions and answers, not a spellbook, and it shows what the myth wanted people to believe the god’s knowledge looked like: an examination, not a shortcut.
Why an English occultist took the name in 1944
That myth traveled. The Greeks identified Thoth with Hermes from at least the fifth century BCE; Herodotus reports the equation, and by the Roman period the combined figure was called Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice-great. A group of Greek texts, the Corpus Hermeticum, written between roughly the second and fourth centuries CE, was attributed to him. When Marsilio Ficino translated them into Latin in 1463 and published them in 1471, the Renaissance received a library that claimed to be older than Plato. It was not Egyptian. But it was named for the same god, and the claim stuck.
In 1781 the French scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin added a new layer. In his Monde primitif he argued that the tarot was a survival of an ancient Egyptian book. There is no evidence for this, and the assertion muddies tarot history to this day. But it gave occultists permission to treat a deck of cards as a fragment of the Book of Thoth. Crowley inherited that permission.
Aleister Crowley (1875 to 1947) joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1898 and learned its tarot system from the inside. In April 1904, in Cairo, he wrote down a text he said was dictated by a praeterhuman intelligence named Aiwass: the Book of the Law (Liber AL vel Legis), which announced a new epoch, the Aeon of Horus. In 1938 he commissioned Lady Frieda Harris (1877 to 1962) to paint a deck that would embody that aeon. She worked in London from 1938 to 1943, painting 78 cards in gouache, while Crowley dictated the symbolism and revised every drawing; she nearly bankrupted herself to finish. The commentary was published in 1944 as The Book of Thoth, with reproductions of her paintings. The deck itself reached the public only in 1969, when U.S. Games Systems issued it, seven years after Harris died. The original paintings now rest at the Warburg Institute in London.
What the symbols actually encode
The deck Crowley designed is a machine of symbols, not a set of pretty pictures. Its frame is the Golden Dawn’s system: the 22 trumps are assigned to the 22 Hebrew letters and the paths of the Tree of Life; the 56 small cards are assigned through the four elements to the planets and the zodiac. Every card in the Thoth deck is an equation with astrology, alchemy, and Qabalah as its terms.
Crowley renamed several trumps to fit the system he was building. Strength became Lust (the letter Teth, the sign Leo), Justice became Adjustment (Lamed, Libra), Temperance became Art (Samekh, Sagittarius), Judgement became the Aeon (Shin, fire), and the World became the Universe (Tau). The court cards are Knight, Queen, Prince, and Princess instead of the older Page, Knight, Queen, and King. These are not cosmetic edits. Each rename shifts the card’s magical weight: the Aeon is not a last judgment of the dead but a rupture between ages, exactly what Crowley believed had happened in 1904.
The Egyptian myth encodes the same ambition with simpler images. The two spells are a complete curriculum in themselves: to understand every living voice, and to see the gods in motion. The nested caskets read like a map of initiation, each material a grade, the gold at the center being the book itself. No wonder the story survived. It is the shortest description in existence of what an occult library is for.
How the Book of Thoth is used
A machine is made to run. Since 1969 the Thoth deck has been in continuous service for divination, and Crowley’s book is the manual readers work from. The arrangement is deliberately demanding: there are no forgiving images, and a reader who ignores a card’s planet, element, and letter will miss half the meaning. Practitioners who use the Thoth system learn the book the way students in the House of Life learned their dialogue: question, answer, revise.
The book also serves as a meditation companion. A common practice is to take one trump at a time, lay the card out, read its section in the commentary, and sit with the image until the symbols resolve into a single impression. The work is slow, and it is supposed to be. Crowley designed the deck to reward exactly that pace, and Harris’s saturated colors give the eye plenty to hold.
The mythic book is used differently. No one has ever cast its spells, because the spells were never written down outside the story. What survives is the warning, and practitioners have used it as a gatekeeping rule: approach the full system only after the basics are uncomfortably familiar. We keep the same rule in our own reading room.
The Book of Thoth and the books around it
Practice invites comparison, and the Thoth system has strong neighbors. The Thoth deck shares the tarot market with the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, published in 1909 by A.E. Waite with art by Pamela Colman Smith. Both decks come from the Golden Dawn, and both are systematic. The difference is display. The Rider-Waite deck shows narrative scenes in medieval stage sets; the Thoth deck shows compressed symbols in radiant color. Beginners often find one comfortable and the other overwhelming. Serious users tend to pick a side.
The name is also confused with the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The Book of the Dead, as in the Papyrus of Ani from around 1250 BCE, is a collection of funerary spells for the afterlife. The mythical Book of Thoth is a grimoire of mastery for the living. Two different genres, two different clients: one for the dead, one for the dangerously curious.
Behind both stands the Corpus Hermeticum, the philosophical shadow of the whole tradition. It claims the same divine author, but it is written in Greek and turns toward contemplation and salvation rather than card reading. If the Book of Thoth is a toolbox, the Hermetica is the theology that explains why the toolbox exists. For the fuller picture, we keep a guide to the Corpus Hermeticum.
What people get wrong
Comparisons clear up part of the confusion. The stubborn errors need their own treatment.
The most common error is to assume the ancient Book of Thoth survives. It does not. The mythical book exists only inside the Setne story, and no tomb has yielded a volume written by the god. The Vienna papyrus is real, but it is a teaching dialogue, not a spellbook, and “Book of Thoth” is a modern scholarly nickname.
Another error: people say Crowley painted the Thoth Tarot. He did not. He directed, argued, and wrote; Frieda Harris painted, for five years, at her own expense. A third error is to treat the deck as a recovered artifact. It is a twentieth-century creation, and it does not pretend to be anything else.
A fourth error is the claim that the Thoth deck is too chaotic to read. The opposite is true. It may be the most structurally strict tarot deck ever published; every element on every card answers to a rule. The chaos is in the color, not the construction.
FAQ
Is the Book of Thoth a real ancient book? No single ancient book by that name survives. The mythical one exists only in the Setne story, and the Demotic Vienna papyrus is a scholarly dialogue that modern editors titled the Book of Thoth.
What is the difference between the Book of Thoth and the Thoth Tarot? The Thoth Tarot is the 78-card deck Frieda Harris painted from 1938 to 1943. The Book of Thoth is Crowley’s 1944 commentary that explains it. One is the deck, the other is the manual.
Did Aleister Crowley paint the Thoth Tarot? No. He designed the symbolism and commissioned the work; Lady Frieda Harris painted all 78 cards.
Does the Book of Thoth contain real Egyptian spells? In the story, the book holds two spells, one for understanding the speech of animals and one for seeing Re in his barque. No such spellbook has been found outside the tale.
The name still splits three ways, and it will keep splitting. What holds the versions together is the claim that written knowledge has teeth, and the warning that the teeth are not always friendly. To follow the current that runs from Thoth to Crowley, start at our Hermeticism hub, where the tradition gets its proper context.