There’s something creepy about the Judgement card, especially to the modern eye. When we see corpses climbing out of coffins, our minds immediately go to some sort of a zombie apocalypse where dead people are trying to take over the earth.
Yikes! Run away, run away!
JUDGEMENT AND REINCARNATION
Obviously, the intent of the card and the artist was to portray Judgement Day, when the Angel Gabriel blows his horn and we all rise from the dead and have a nice brunch with Jesus and his Daddy.
While that may seem like a bit of a primitive belief today, it probably points toward the doctrine of reincarnation. We have to remember that the Tarot was introduced into Europe at a time when the Inquisition was in full swing. The priests and monks would happily tie you to a stake, light a fire under you, and toast s’mores if you deviated from their doctrine.
Reincarnation definitely deviated from their doctrine, so the designers of the Tarot cards had to have a way to introduce the concept without getting themselves killed. Judgement Day was the closest Christian analog to the concept, and so we have this very Christian scene with reanimated corpses.
JUDGEMENT AND THE TAROT JOURNEY
The Major Arcana of the Tarot shows the journey of the new soul, as illustrated in The Fool, through the various stages of life here on the Earth School. At different times we may reincarnate as royalty, as warriors, as mystics, as priests and prelates, each lifetime a stage of growth and evolution.
Included in those cards is the Death card. Now, the logical question here is why the Judgement card wasn’t paired with the Death card. That would be the normal Christian sequence, would it not? You live your life, you die, and then Gabriel blows his horn and you pop into heaven or hell. Period.
Using the Christian doctrine, Death and Judgement should have been the last cards in the deck. But they aren’t.
The Death card is followed by eight other cards, indicating that mortal death is far from the end. It isn’t even the end of that one journey; it’s just a rest stop.
The Judgement card reminds us that the journey goes on. When one lifetime ends, another begins, and we continue to reincarnate again and again until we finally learn the lessons we’re here to learn.
THE SYMBOLS
The symbolism in the Judgement card is a little heavy-handed.
The coffins represent past restrictions or boundaries that we’ve overcome.
The group of people rising from the coffins—man, woman, child—shows people rising from those restrictions and moving beyond them.
The angel blowing the horn denotes the divine vibration that reanimates us in our new incarnation.
For the most part, I discard the cross on the flag as another sop to Christian theology. If it were simply a white flag, we could interpret that as purification and starting over.
The mountains show the new obstacles that we’ll have to overcome in the next incarnation.
WHEN YOU GET JUDGEMENT IN A READING
Judgement obviously indicates a major awakening in our life. When it turns up in a reading, it shows that we’ve made a judgement about our lives and we’re turning in a whole new direction.
It is NOT about being judged by some cranky old man in the sky.
Ultimately, Judgement is about self-judgement. It’s taking stock of our lives and deciding whether we’re satisfied with what we’ve been doing. It’s making a decision about what direction we move in next. In most cases, if the card is upright, it indicates that we’ve made a positive judgement—we can look back over our incarnation and feel that we’ve made the right decisions and we’ve evolved. Now it’s time to move onward.
If the card is reversed, it can indicate harsh, negative self-judgement. It can indicate that we’re clinging to the past, refusing to move forward and deal with the karma we’ve accumulated. We choose to stay in our little boxes rather than starting a new cycle.
And, having made those judgements, we move on to the last card in the Tarot cycle, the new lifetime, The World.
