Chapter 3: Reading the Cards

In this book I present the open reading, which is my way of reading the Tarot cards. The original inspiration for the open reading came from the teachings of Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose lectures and workshops I attended for three years in Paris during the 1980s. Later, I developed and added to it from my own ideas and experiences. The open reading approach can be applied to different kinds of cards. But its full potential emerges through the Tarot de Marseille, the product of many centuries of trial and error, adaptation and evolution.

The following three points can summarize the open reading approach and the way in which it differs from more conventional methods. First, a Tarot card does not have a fixed meaning which can be learned in advance. Rather, the meaning emerges from what we can see in the card during the reading. Second, the function of each position in a spread is also not fixed. Rather, it depends on the combination of cards that actually appear. Third, we don’t start by interpreting each card separately. Instead, we first try to see the whole picture that the cards form together. We shall discuss these points in detail throughout the rest of this chapter.