The True Source of the Opening of the Key (OOTK)

Unearthing the Hidden Lineage of the Tarot’s Most Advanced Spread

an ornate key with keyhole

The Opening of the Key—OOTK—is not merely a tarot spread. It is a rite. A ritual in five movements, designed to illuminate a particular situation with the severity of a lightning flash across the unillumined soul. For those who have encountered it in practice, the OOTK is less a layout of cards than an initiatory mechanism.

This method was popularised in Israel Regardie's presentation of the Golden Dawn rituals. Yet it is worth noting, indeed it is essential, that MacGregor Mathers, the much-vaunted founder of that Order, never took the tarot seriously in itself. For Mathers, the tarot served largely as a tool to reinforce the Grade structure. It was Crowley who understood the deeper current.

The origin of the OOTK lies not in the romanticised vision of Egyptian temples or Atlantean priesthoods, but in a sober, anonymous working document. Crafted by high-level Freemasons, practitioners of a more austere and unadorned current, this manuscript was never meant for public eyes. Crowley, in a flash of genius or possibly treachery, republished it in The Equinox, Volume I, Number 8, under the title:
“A Description of the Cards of the Tarot; with their Attributions; Including a Method of Divination by their Use.”

This same document became the bedrock of The Book of Thoth, where Crowley preserved the method of the Opening of the Key verbatim. His descriptions of the Minor and Court cards flow directly from this source, not from the teachings of Mathers or the formal curriculum of the Golden Dawn.

Mathers, for his part, had been obsessed with the so-called Cipher Manuscript, another transmission from the same Masonic Adepts. Upon the death of Kenneth Mackenzie, a former conduit for these secret teachings, Mathers famously accosted his widow, demanding access to the documents. Alongside Wynn Westcott, he translated the Cipher Manuscript into the elaborate rituals that became the structure of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

In doing so, they placed the Major Arcana cards on the 22 paths of the Tree of Life. It was an act that shattered the organic unity of the Tarot. The cards, once whole in themselves, were dissected, dispersed across the Sephiroth and cast into a Kabbalistic system that prized intellectual allegory over lived symbolism.

Initiates in the Golden Dawn were then introduced to the Major Arcana not as an integrated whole but piecemeal, card by card, Grade by Grade—beginning with The Universe, rising from Malkuth. The result? A vertical dismemberment. The Tarot, once holistic and biblical in root, was rebranded as an esoteric puzzle for the initiated few.

And yet, the original document—the fountainhead—survived.

As the Golden Child of the Order, Mathers may well have shown Crowley the Masonic original. If so, it would have been one of the last genuine acts between them before expulsion closed the doors.

Crowley, ever the prophet of the New Aeon, recognised the document for what it was: a transmission. A current. A survival of the true tarot, before its fragmentation. He tried, unsuccessfully, to have the manuscript entrusted to the British Museum.

But it survives still, veiled and overlooked, waiting for the student who seeks not simply a “spread”, but the Opening of the Key.

I use the OOTK daily in my capacity as a professional tarot reader. In future posts I will delve deeper into this iconic spread.