Tarot: The Open Labyrinth—40th Anniversary Edition

Understanding Your Journey Through the Cards

Rachel Pollack author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Red Wheel/Weiser

Publishing:10th Sep '26

£16.99

This title is due to be published on 10th September, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Tarot: The Open Labyrinth—40th Anniversary Edition cover

A tarot reading lies open before us, all of its images laid out 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 Tarot: The Open Labyrinth, Rachel Pollack presents interpretations and commentaries on a collection of readings.

The approach is exhaustive yet 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.

First published in 1986 by the Aquarian Press and long out of print, Tarot: The Open Labyrinth is for readers who wish to take their reading to the next level by learning from the master. Rachel Pollack writes that this book is intended to tell us “how the Tarot can help us answer specific questions, act as a tool for psychological analysis, and tell us how to overcome problems.”

“Rachel Pollack was one of tarot’s greatest teachers, and this book shows why. I taught with her for forty years, and she demonstrates that transformation through deep soul work makes all things possible. By letting her lead you into the labyrinthine center of real readings and back out again, your own readings will be forever changed. The cards show us the way if we let them. This rerelease is a gift you’ll not want to miss.”
—Mary K. Greer, author of Essence of Tarot

“Rachel Pollack approached Tarot as a living exchange between the reader, the subject, and the images. In Tarot: The Open Labyrinth, she brings us inside that exchange, revealing a mind at work—curious, disciplined, and open to surprise. Each reading unfolds with a depth and immediacy of lived experience, where interpretation becomes an art of attention and discovery. What emerges is not a method to imitate, but a way of seeing that deepens with practice and returns, always, to the self.”
—Amber Highland, author of The Oracle of Knotty Weave, publisher of The Cartomancer

“Rachel Pollack’s curious and intelligent approach to Tarot has been a gift to readers for decades. How lucky are we that Tarot: The Open Labyrinth is back in print! This unique book takes the reader on a journey that goes beyond traditional meanings. Detailed examples and insightful meditations turn average Tarot readings into deep, meaningful experiences for both querent and reader. If you’re ready to go further with the cards, this book deserves a place in your Tarot library, right next to all of Rachel’s books, including the much-loved 78 Degrees of Wisdom.”
—Theresa Reed, author of Tarot: No Questions Asked

“Rachel Pollack continues to be my Tarot mentor and the leading voice in our Tarot-verse with the rerelease of Tarot: The Open Labyrinth. She reminds us to look deep into the cards, that it’s okay to change your mind about the Tarot, and that it’s a game, after all. It’s good to play sometimes, too.”
—Melissa Cynova, author of Tarot Elements

“Rachel Pollack’s Tarot: The Open Labyrinth gives us permission to get lost—and the getting lost is the point. Rachel doesn’t deliver tarot as a sequence of keywords and positions; she walks it as a labyrinth, layered and associative, where cards speak to one another simultaneously rather than in order. She holds intellectual rigor and ethical seriousness in the same hand as care. Come get lost only to be found, as the labyrinth is waiting, but only if you’re willing to veer off in an unexpected direction.”
—Jenna Matlin, author of The Tarot Book of the Dead

“Rachel Pollack’s Tarot: The Open Labyrinth will have you falling in love once again, or for the first time, with the cards and their symbols and stories. ‘A Tarot reading lies before us like a labyrinth,’ she writes in the introduction, and, yet, as always, Rachel is like the lamp in The Hermit card: a wise, shining light through the darkness.”
—Aliza Einhorn, author of Tarot of the Unconscious and The Little Book of Saturn

“Another tarot classic! With Tarot: The Open Labyrinth, Rachel Pollack guides us through the Daedalian architecture that unfolds within a tarot reading. Her great gift is not to serve as our Ariadne’s thread—an imposed path through her own vision—but to place the spool itself in our hands, the Naxian bobbin, so that we may move with true autonomy. This remains one of my favorite works; at once poetic and rigorously practical, it allows us to witness how she navigated the cards—welcoming disorientation with a kind of gleeful intelligence, as an essential gesture of the art. To lose oneself, and in doing so, to discover the way anew.”
—Laetitia Barbier, author of Tarot and Divination Cards

ISBN: 9781578639144

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

208 pages