Crowley had a friend named Clifford Bax, who had also known Allan Bennett and Austin Osman Spare. They had met at St. Moritz three decades earlier, and played chess: Bax remembered Crowley's “black magnetic eyes”, and also felt that “to play chess with a man is to realise the voltage of his intellect. A strong and imaginative mind directed the pieces that opposed me.”
Bax had a flat in Albany, the celebrated bachelor apartment complex on Piccadilly, opposite Fortnum and Mason, where other tenants have included Lord Byron and Aldous Huxley. He also belonged to a couple of clubs, including the RAC (Royal Automobile) Club a block or two south on Pall Mall; not as socially exclusive as some clubs, it is materially one of the best in terms of premises, built by the same architects as the Ritz. Crowley had asked him if he could introduce him to a woman who could help him in his work, so Bax brought three to lunch at 89 Pall Mall on 9 June 1937. Along with writer Lesley Blanch and actress Meum Stewart, he brought Lady Frieda Harris, an artist who was married to Liberal MP Sir Percy Harris.
Lady Frieda was only two years younger than Crowley – 60 to his 62 – and rather plain, with a beaky nose giving her a somewhat Edith Sitwell appearance. Fortunately they never became lovers, but they did become friends. Harris had always had a sense of the spiritual and esoteric, and had been through Christian Science and Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy, as well as Co-Masonry (an offshoot branch of Masonry that admitted women; British Co-Masonry was headed by Annie Besant, more widely remembered as a Theosophist).
When Crowley took Frieda on as a student he felt she was “seriously on the Path”, and she told him of an experience of Dhyana she'd had as a child, outdoors in a field of gorse. A while later he gave her an unusually good explanation of the Great Work – far clearer than those in Magick in Theory in Practice – in terms that combine the oath of the Magister Templi with the alchemical Great Work or Magnum Opus, the transmutation of base matter (or ordinary life) into gold by the Philosopher's Stone. She had to “‘interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with your soul’… then, having embraced and loved the fact (however repugnant) you thereby transform it into holiness and beauty. This is the Great Work.” 1
Frieda's husband Sir Percy Harris (“the foul Jew she married”) was Liberal MP for Bethnal Green. He worked for the underdog and the disadvantaged, and in that respect he was the polar opposite of The Book of the Law, as Crowley seems to have noticed; in 1943 he suggested Frieda should stand against him as the Thelemite candidate for Bethnal Green.
Sir Percy was extremely busy and rather boring: Tom Driberg remembers he was nicknamed ‘The Housemaid’, because he emptied the chamber.2 Lady Frieda was far more unconventional, verging on eccentric: she had exhibited her paintings, at the New English Art Club in 1929, under the name of “Jesus Chutney”. She had already had a lover, but with the lover gone – he died – she was glad of Crowley's company. They dined together regularly, and between them they came up with the idea that she should illustrate his innovative Tarot deck, The Book of Thoth, a complex, Modernist and austerely disturbing deck very different from the almost fairytale comfort of the Rider deck, probably the twentieth century's best-loved popular tarot, designed by A.E. Waite and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith.
Harris took Crowley under her wing, giving him £2 a week (which sounds like his pocket money, but it was a useful allowance of well over £100 today). Like Yorke and Karl Germer she gets her share of vituperation in Crowley's diaries and letters – “a dangerous lunatic, the most treacherous and deceitful person that I know, or have ever known”; “constant thieving from me”; “Frieda's latest disloyal but imbecile intrigue”; “really ill from Frieda's savage ravings” – but she was perhaps Crowley's main friend in later life.
When she first met Crowley she gave her address as Percy's flat, 15 North Court, Wood St, Westminster (convenient for Parliament) but the Harrises’ larger and more long-term house, which Crowley came to know well, was Morton House, The Mall, Chiswick. She was an executor of his will at his death in 1947, using the address of her studio at 3 Devonshire Terrace, Marylebone, and she put together and published the Order of Service from his funeral, The Last Ritual.