Tarot Readings and Meditations

In 1980, Pollack still saw herself as a fiction writer who had taken a quick detour into writing about the Tarot. That began to change, however, as her reading (both of Tarot cards and of other people's books) suggested another Tarot book. Her style of doing Tarot readings at the time was very thorough, and she went into great detail, trying to wring every last morsel of meaning from a spread. "I thought, 'maybe it would be useful for people to see this method, since very few other people are doing it this way,'" she remembered. Influenced also by her readings in psychology, she envisioned the new book as a set of case studies. The result was Tarot: The Open Labyrinth (1986), later re-titled Tarot Readings and Meditations. "I did a reading, I got the people's permission, and then...since it was in writing, and I could stop and think about it, I actually went into more depth [in the book] than I originally had in the reading." The book contains seven readings, one simple three-card reading, three Celtic Cross readings, and three using the "Work Cycle" spread. It also includes two sample meditations, on the Fool and the Eight of Cups. It is a very useful complement to Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, and is sometimes considered the third volume of a trilogy formed with the two volumes of her previous book.