Learn Tarot · Spreads and Methods, Step by Step · Lesson 25 of 25

The Opening of the Key, step by step

The Golden Dawn's great divination with the whole deck: choosing a Significator, counting by card values, pairing, and reading five operations from the opening of the question to the Tree of Life.

The great divination

The Opening of the Key is the method of divination the Golden Dawn taught its members in Book T. It uses all seventy-eight cards in five operations, each of which reshuffles the deck and looks at the question from a new angle: its nature, where it lies in life, its character, how it develops, and how it resolves. It is long and it is meant to be. The app does the shuffling, dealing and counting for you, so you can spend your attention on reading.

It works best for one serious, well-defined question. Take it slowly: many readers read one operation a sitting and write each down before moving on.

The Significator

Before anything else you choose a court card to stand for the querent, the person the question is about. Book T matched it to the person: Kings for men, Queens for women, Knights and Pages for younger people, and the suit by coloring, from Wands for the fairest to Pentacles for the darkest. Many readers now choose by temperament instead, using the lesson on court cards: a Queen of Cups for a feeling, intuitive querent, a Knight of Swords for a quick and restless one.

The Significator also sets the direction of counting. Book T counts the way the court card's face is turned. Because card art varies, the app follows a common convention: Pages and Queens count with the layout, Kings and Knights against it, and a reversed Significator turns the other way.

Counting and pairing

Every operation is read the same way. The pile that holds the Significator is laid out in a horseshoe, treated as a circle. Starting from the Significator, which counts as one, you count along by the value of each card you land on.

• Small cards count their number: a Seven counts seven.
• Aces count five (eleven in Crowley's later version, an option in the app).
• Pages count seven; Kings, Queens and Knights count four.
• Trumps count by their Hebrew letter: three for the three mother letters, nine for the seven doubles, twelve for the twelve simples.

Say the Significator is the Queen of Cups. A Queen counts four, so you count four cards, the Queen as one, and land on the Three of Swords. Three more brings you to The Lovers, a sign card worth twelve, and so on until you land on a card you have already counted. The cards you landed on, in order, are the story of the matter.

Then you pair the cards from the two ends of the horseshoe inward, first with last, second with second-to-last, and read the pairs as detail that fills in the story. Each counted card is judged by its elemental dignity, by the cards on either side of it, exactly as in the lesson on dignities.

Operation one: the opening of the question

The deck is cut into four piles for the four letters of the divine name, YHVH, and their elements.

• Yod, Fire: work, energy, strife and opposition.
• Heh, Water: love, pleasure, marriage and merriment.
• Vau, Air: trouble, sickness, loss and scandal.
• Heh final, Earth: business, money, goods and material matters.

The pile in which the Significator falls shows what the matter is really about. Book T treats this as a check: it should agree with the question. When a question about love opens in the pile of money, it is worth asking whether money is the true subject.

Operations two to five

• Two, the twelve houses: the deck is dealt into twelve piles for the astrological houses. The house holding the Significator shows the area of life where the matter is being worked out, such as the Seventh for partnership or the Tenth for career.
• Three, the twelve signs: twelve piles again, now for the signs of the zodiac. The sign holding the Significator describes the character and quality of the matter.
• Four, the thirty-six decans: the Significator is placed in the center and the next thirty-six cards are laid in a ring around it, one for each decan from the first of Aries. This shows how the matter develops.
• Five, the Tree of Life: ten piles for the sephiroth. Where the Significator lands shows the spiritual root of the matter and how it finally resolves.

Each operation is counted and paired in the same way, and each adds a layer: what the matter is, where it lives, what it is like, how it unfolds and how it ends.

Weighing the whole

Book T also looks at the make-up of each layout. A majority of one suit colors the operation with that element: many Wands mean energy and opposition, many Cups pleasure, many Swords trouble, many Pentacles business and money. Many trumps mean forces beyond the querent's control; many court cards mean society, meetings and other people. The app notes these for you under each operation.

When you have read all five, step back and look for what repeats. A card or suit that turns up in three operations is the reading insisting on something. Write the answer in a few plain sentences, as you would for any spread.

Try it

Choose a question you care about and a Significator for yourself. In the app, open the traditional methods and start the Opening of the Key, then read only the first operation today: write down which pile the Significator fell in, the counted cards in order, and one sentence on what they say.