AUTHOR’S NOTE: First a confession: it’s been years (make that decades) since I last performed all five “operations” of the Golden Dawn’s “Opening of the Key” (OotK) method of divination, which can take hours to complete and yields far more information than any ordinary inquiry requires. This fact alone severely limits its application in professional reading situations, although I don’t think that was its intended purpose despite frequent mention of “the Querent” in the literature.

I understand that the rank-and-file members of the organization’s “Outer Order” seldom went past the First Operation of the OotK, and I’ve contented myself with doing the same, typically conducting just the initial “elemental binning” step since it serves as an excellent preface to other spreads like the Celtic Cross by offering a heads-up about the likely elemental focus of the subsequent reading. Even if the rest of the cards don’t bear this out through preponderance or sensitive placement of the highlighted element, it can be “taken under advisement” in case its significance pops up later in the narrative.

I “backed into” involvement with the OotK via my early encounter with Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth (which contained the model I worked with at the time), and I didn’t discover the original version in the Golden Dawn’s Liber T until considerably later. Between those two watershed events I found my way to its presence in The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic compiled by Israel Regardie with input from Christopher Hyatt; in Jim Eshelman’s Liber Theta, his Thoth-based rewrite of Liber T; and in Paul Foster Case’s brief study of tarot divination, which I didn’t know existed until long after I had abandoned my B.O.T.A membership.

I quickly learned that, as an experienced astrologer and student of the Hermetic Qabalah and the Tree of Life (ToL), I have ways other than tarot reading to investigate the personal impact of the twelve astrological houses (Second Operation of the OoTK); the twelve zodiacal signs (Third Operation); the 36 decanates (Fourth Operation) and the ten sephiroth of the Tree of Life (Fifth Operation). While the underlying occult principles of the tarot are always operable in a syncretic fashion during my work, I don’t feel the need to press the cards into service to help define (or divine) its dimensions. I look for quick, reliable answers on practical matters from my prognostication, not the tarot version of War and Peace.

But if I decide to undertake the OotK again, I believe I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt and carry through to the end of the First Operation by performing the “counting-and-pairing” steps even if I don’t intend to go further. Although I didn’t find Crowley’s instructions for this exercise particularly helpful since they offered no rationale, Paul Foster Case provided a lucid explanation in his divination material, and Christopher Hyatt was not far behind in Regardie’s massive tome.

The First Operation strikes me as the “heart” of the method anyway, and the four installments that follow constitute “piling on” with additional detail from a tarot-informed astrological and ToL perspective when I’d just as soon keep those disciplines separate. The willingness of the architects of the OokT to scrub the reading if they guessed wrong about the Significator’s location when “telling the Querent why he has come” makes me think they didn’t have a lot of confidence in the concatenation of techniques, so why bother? If they must be combined with tarot, I see no reason why each one can’t be performed independently, much like the standalone astrological and Tree of Life spreads, with the additional twist of counting-and-pairing the cards to create the narrative once the Significator is found. I’ve almost convinced myself to purchase Paul Hughes-Barlow’s book on the OotK just to see if there is anything important I’m missing. I can still say “no way” after becoming enlightened, and I wouldn’t bet against that happening.