Tarot: The Open Labyrinth―40th Anniversary Edition: Understanding Your Journey Through the Cards

by Rachel Pollack, Mat Auryn (Afterword), Zoe Matoff (Foreword)

“Rachel Pollack was one of Tarot’s greatest teachers, and this book shows why.” 
―Mary K. Greer, author of Essence of Tarot A Tarot reading lies open before us; all its images are placed on the table. Yet at the same time, they form a labyrinth, not simply a puzzle to be decoded but also a complex pathway deep into ourselves. In The Open Labyrinth, renowned expert Rachel Pollack presents interpretations and commentaries on a collection of readings in this foundational book on divination.The approach is both comprehensive and specific, going steadily deeper into the person’s concerns in a context of light and dark, the Magician and the High Priestess. Through a recognition of this context, the subject and the reader open up their lives. In her classic Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel Pollack described how we can form meditation patterns―Tarot mandalas―to help us go beyond the reading itself. In this book, she gives examples of these mandalas and describes how people involved use them and their experiences.A previously lost classic from Tarot master Rachel Pollack, The Open Labyrinth is for readers who wish to take their reading to the next level.

Genres: Tarot, Nonfiction

208 pages, Paperback

Published August 3, 2026

About the author

Rachel Grace Pollack was an American science fiction author, comic book writer, and expert on divinatory tarot. Pollack was a great influence on the women's spirituality movement.

Reviews

[Michelle Avery · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rachel Pollack was quite simply one of the greatest tarot thinkers and teachers we have ever had, and Tarot: The Open Labyrinth is a perfect example of why. Originally published in 1986 and unavailable for far too long, this book feels remarkably fresh forty years later. If Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom taught generations of readers how to understand tarot, The Open Labyrinth shows what can happen when that understanding is brought fully alive in an actual reading.

What I love most about this book is that Pollack lets us watch her think. Rather than giving us another catalog of card meanings, she presents readings and then takes us deeper and deeper into them, showing how individual cards speak to one another, how patterns emerge, and how a reading can become something far more profound than answering a question. The labyrinth of the title is a perfect metaphor. A tarot spread isn't a puzzle with one correct solution. It is a pathway you enter, and Pollack demonstrates how following its images can lead into psychology, symbolism, personal conflict, possibility, and genuine transformation.

The material on tarot mandalas alone makes this worth reading. Pollack takes ideas introduced in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom and shows how cards can move beyond divination into meditation and direct experience. Instead of simply interpreting the cards and putting them back in the deck, the imagery becomes something you can enter into and work with. That transition from reading tarot to experiencing tarot is one of the things Pollack understood better than almost anyone.

There is also something wonderful about reading a book this old and realizing how little of it feels dated. So much of what contemporary tarot readers now take for granted was shaped by thinkers like Rachel Pollack. Her approach is psychologically sophisticated without reducing tarot to psychology, mystical without becoming vague, and intellectually deep without losing the human being sitting across the table. She understood that tarot can answer specific questions while simultaneously revealing the deeper patterns underneath those questions.

I'm especially happy to see this edition include an appreciation by Mat Auryn. Anyone familiar with Auryn's work, particularly The Psychic Art of Tarot, will recognize a shared understanding that tarot can become much more than memorizing seventy-eight definitions. Pollack was one of the people who helped open that door for modern readers, and having a contemporary tarot teacher like Auryn honor her legacy here feels incredibly fitting.

This isn't necessarily where I would send someone looking for their very first introduction to tarot. But if you already know the cards and want to understand what a truly masterful reader can actually do with them, read this. Rachel Pollack doesn't simply explain tarot. She demonstrates a way of thinking with tarot, moving through it, and allowing its symbols to reveal dimensions of a situation that a surface interpretation could never reach. Forty years later, we're still learning from her, and I suspect tarot readers will be doing so for generations to come.

[Jessica Nightshade · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are Tarot books that teach you what the cards mean, and then there are Tarot books that quietly rearrange your understanding of what a reading even is. The Open Labyrinth belongs firmly in the second category. Rachel Pollack isn’t particularly interested in handing you another collection of meanings to memorize. She’s interested in what happens when seventy-eight images collide with an actual human life.

What makes this book so fascinating is that you essentially get to watch Pollack read. She follows strange little threads through spreads, notices conversations happening between cards, changes direction when something unexpected appears, and keeps asking what else the reading might be saying. Sometimes a card answers the question. Sometimes it exposes the question underneath the question. There’s an intellectual playfulness to the whole thing that I adore. Tarot becomes less like decoding a message and more like entering a conversation where you genuinely don’t know what will be said next.

The Tarot mandalas were another highlight for me. Pollack takes cards out of the usual beginning-middle-end structure of a spread and turns them into something you can contemplate and inhabit. The reading becomes a kind of symbolic environment rather than an event that ends when the cards go back into the box. It’s weird, psychological, mystical, and extremely Rachel Pollack.

And I’m thrilled that this book is available again. Originally published in 1986 and long out of print, it feels less like someone dug up an old Tarot book and more like we recovered a missing piece of Pollack’s work. The new edition is beautifully bookended by Zoe Matoff’s foreword and Mat Auryn’s afterword, which give the reappearance of the book a sense of remembrance and continuation.

What I love most is that Pollack never makes advanced Tarot feel like accumulating increasingly obscure correspondences until you know more trivia than everyone else. Depth comes from learning how to look. How to linger. How to notice the card you initially dismissed, follow the uncomfortable interpretation, or realize halfway through that you’ve been asking the wrong question. That’s a much harder thing to teach, and somehow Pollack does it.

If you already know what the cards mean and are wondering what comes next, read this. The Open Labyrinth doesn’t give you another map of the Tarot. It teaches you why getting a little lost inside it might be the whole point.

[William Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would happily have traded some of my tarot books for another six or seven readings in this one. That is partly a compliment, though it is also why I’m giving it four stars. Pollack lets you follow her interpretations closely enough that the small number of examples becomes frustrating. I wanted to see what she would do with more questions, particularly the awkward ones people struggle to phrase when they sit down for a reading.

The appeal is being able to follow what she notices. Why pursue that association? What happens to an interpretation when you consider the other cards? Those are the questions I want a tarot book to spend time on. I can look up a correspondence myself. Having someone explain how they arrived at a particular reading is harder to come by, and Pollack gives that process the attention it deserves.

That makes the limited selection a real drawback for me. I appreciate the space she gives each reading, but I wanted a broader range of situations to think through alongside her. Another handful would have helped demonstrate how this approach adapts to different concerns. I was interested enough to keep going, and the book had other plans.

The mandala material also caught my attention. Working with the cards in meditation allows you to return to something from a reading that you haven’t finished thinking about. I like having something to do with an interpretation afterward, especially when it raises a question you can’t immediately answer. It gives the consultation a longer life.

I’m glad this is available again. There’s a particular pleasure in following a knowledgeable reader’s decisions, including the ones you might not have made yourself. I just wish the anniversary edition had given us more readings to sit with. I would have made room for a thicker book.

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Rachel Pollack doing what she did better than almost anyone: opening tarot up instead of pinning it down. She does not hand you a rigid system and tell you that the cards only speak one language. She leads you into symbolism, story, personal memory, archetype, and the strange ways a reading can change when you are willing to actually meet it. The title is exactly right. Tarot becomes a labyrinth here, but an open one, where every turn leads you further into the cards and back toward yourself. I loved this book when I first encountered it, and I am happy this anniversary edition puts it in the hands of people who may only know Pollack through *Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom*. Zoe Matoff’s foreword and Mat Auryn’s afterword feel like a thoughtful bridge between generations of readers who have been changed by her work. My only small warning is that this is not the most orderly “tell me what every card means in every situation” guide. Pollack’s mind is associative and abundant, and readers who need a straight line may occasionally feel they have wandered off the path. But the wandering is part of the teaching. This book trusts the reader to make discoveries rather than merely absorb information, which is why it still feels so alive after forty years.

[Sylvia Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a VERY different kind of tarot book from the usual card-by-card guide. Rachel Pollack walks through actual readings and shows how she follows the cards deeper and deeper, noticing connections, contradictions, and patterns that might not be obvious at first. It felt less like being taught definitions and more like getting to watch an incredibly experienced reader think.

I especially loved the idea of the reading as a labyrinth and the sections on tarot mandalas, where the cards become something you can continue working with beyond the original question. There is a psychological depth to the way Pollack reads that gave me a lot to think about for my own practice.

My only real complaint is that it's a surprisingly short read. I finished it wanting MORE examples of her working through readings because that was easily the most valuable part for me. Still, I'd rather have a shorter tarot book this useful than another 400 pages of meanings I've already read twenty times.

Definitely not where I'd start as an absolute beginner, but if you already know the cards and want to get better at actually READING them together, this is excellent.

[Linus Merchant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rachel Pollack presents a way of interpreting tarot from the point of view of the querent, the breaking down of each card in the reading and relating them to each other in relation to the original question. I felt the book started out really well and offered interesting perspectives in corresponding relationships between the cards and outcomes but then didn’t move on and relate cards to other situations and outcomes. Here’s some guy, here’s another situation.. but here’s an open lesbian relationship and that is going to be the focus of the rest of the book. I would have rated the book higher if there had have been more reading scenarios, less repetition between card correspondences and the final part of the book being so focused on a single reading/situation.

[Karen Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tarot: The Open Labrinth is a book you keep next to you as a resource book. It has so much knowledge in it to take in and is so spot on with its meanings. I would recommend this book to anyone who is into Tarot reading new or experienced.

[Will Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you #goodreadsgiveaway. Undeniably unique, well written and informative.