In a previous article I discussed how the original Golden Dawn spread known as Opening of the Key fits perfectly into the mold of traditional divination by cards, although it adds certain occult layers to it. This is largely due to the absence of one-card-per-position layouts, the presence of peculiar techniques and the tendency to read cards in rows.

To sum up how the spread worked:

• You selected a significator for the querent (usually among the court cards)
• You shuffled the deck and let the querent cut it into four stacks (corresponding to the four letters of the Tetragrammaton)
• You found the stack with the significator and had to divine, based on its position, the nature of the querent’s problem. If wrong, the divination wasn’t radical.
• You had to spread out the cards into a row or arrange them into a ring and count starting from the querent’s card. Then, you had to pair the cards on either side of the querent to fill out the details.
• Then you shuffled the deck again and dealt it out into the twelve houses. You had to find the querent’s significator and count and pair as before based on the house.
• You shuffled the deck again and dealt it into the twelve signs. You found the stack, counted and paired.
• You shuffled the deck, then looked for the significator and dealt out the 36 cards following it into a ring symbolizing the decans of the zodiac. You counted and paired.
• Finally, you shuffled and dealt the deck into the ten Sephiroth of the Tree of Life, found the stack, counted and paired.

As you may have guessed, the Opening of the Key was a cumbersome spread, and while it was used for the solution of practical matters (Crowley famously remarked on this fact), it clearly was meant to be used primarily within a ritual setting, at least in its entirety.

What is also clear, though, is that the Opening of the Key is less a spread in itself than a blueprint for a complete tarot reading made up of five individual spreads, each of which analyzes the issue from a different standpoint, or rather by tapping into a different layer of it. The experienced card reader could simply choose one of the five spreads and use it without resorting to the others, as need dictates.

For the most part, it seems that many Golden Dawn members simply stuck to the first operation, which is consequently the most famous and iconic, where one cuts the pack into four smaller stacks and reads the one with the significator. The possible reason why the other operations were generally discounted is probably that almost all of them required the deck to be dealt out into small stacks, only one of which is read, so that it takes more time to deal the cards than to read them.

Other members, though, were more inventive. In his Oracle of the Tarot booklet, Paul Foster Case offers a simpler alternative to the five-operation extravaganza of the full method (which he nonetheless describes and recommends for more serious or complex questions)¹

The divination starts as usual: by finding the stack containing the significator and telling the querent what he or she has come for without them telling us, based on the stack. In the original instructions, if the diviner is wrong in assessing the nature of the question, the divination should be abandoned. In reality, aside from the initial period of training, it seems that the location of the significator was simply used to color the interpretation of the cards.

At this point, Case’s simplified method diverges from the original. Instead of spreading out the stack into a single row or ring of cards and starting the counting technique from the significator, Case says the diviner must shuffle the stack and then deal it out into three smaller stacks, corresponding to the past, present, and future. Each stack is then read sequentially (as you would in playing card, Sibilla or Lenormand divination).

The simplification of the method is due to the fact that, instead of starting the exploration of the issue from the past/present with the first operation and then moving on to the further future with the other operations, one has immediately past, present and future condensed into a single method.

There are other ways of simplifying the Opening of the Key. Paul Hughes Barlow rose to some prominence a couple of years ago for his idiosyncratic way of reading the first of operation without relying on a significator, instead reading all four stacks, something for which he was reproved by some.

Personally, I have found Paul Case’s simplification very effective in my experiments, and I’ll probably post an example reading in the future.

MQS

1. He also introduces certain specifications that are also found in the advanced BOTA course on divination elaborated by Ann Davies based on his notes. ↩︎