Tarot Cards – Just the Tarot

How Do I Know Which Tarot Meaning is the Right One?

Which Tarot card meanings should you believe when different books and websites give you different answers? Learn why the images in the Waite-Smith Tarot are one of the best guides to understanding what the cards actually mean—and why sometimes the simplest approach to reading Tarot is simply to look at the pictures.

WHICH TAROT CARD MEANING SHOULD YOU BELIEVE?

One of the questions a lot of beginning Tarot readers have is, “Which definition should I believe?”

If I find two different definitions of the same card that seem to say completely different things, which one should I use?

Actually, that’s not as much of a problem as many new readers might think. You can skim through the various Tarot sites on the internet and discover that most of the definitions are remarkably homogeneous. If anything, there’s sometimes a troubling lack of imagination in them.

Still, there are differences, and those differences can affect your ability to read the cards.

One book might stress that The Emperor brings order and structure, while another views him as rigid and controlling. One site might describe The Hierophant as organized religion, while another sees him as a teacher, mentor or guru figure.

So how do you decide?

THE PAMELA COLMAN SMITH COLORING BOOK

A good starting point for any reader is simply to LOOK at the cards. What are they actually saying?

And I don’t mean, “What vibe am I picking up from this card?” I mean literally look at what the image portrays.

The best place to learn how to do that is the Waite-Smith Tarot deck. The artist behind that deck, Pamela Colman Smith—also known as Pixie—did a phenomenal job of portraying the essence of each card. In a very real sense, the images ARE the definitions.

Each one is a little visual story that tells you what the card is about.

The Three of Swords shows a heart pierced by three swords. It means heartache.

The Five of Wands shows five guys wailing away at each other with sticks. It means conflict, competition or vigorous engagement.

The Eight of Pentacles shows a man sitting at his workbench carving pentacles. It means work, practice and developing skill.

The Three of Cups shows three people raising their goblets and dancing together. It means celebration, friendship and having a good time.

Not too hard, right?

If you’re a beginning reader, start with those pictures and those stories. Think of the Waite-Smith deck almost as a coloring book in which every picture tells a story. Your first job is simply to learn how to read the pictures.

WHEN THE DEFINITIONS ARE WRONG

There ARE times when standard Tarot definitions have drifted away from the images on the cards. When that happens, you can use the artwork itself to double-check the definition.

Let me give you an example.

Take a look at the Nine of Cups. What do you actually see?

When I was learning the Tarot many, many years ago, a common interpretation of this card was an individual who is doing well materially but has a certain air of smugness and self-satisfaction about him.

And that’s pretty much what Colman Smith portrayed. He isn’t smiling so much as smirking. His body language—crossed arms and widely planted legs—practically screams that this is somebody who is very pleased with himself.

It wasn’t necessarily a BAD card. It simply wasn’t a particularly elevated one.

Fast-forward to today, and the Nine of Cups is frequently called “the wish card.” Whatever you want, you can have. Your wishes are coming true.

Really?

Is that what you see in this picture? Rainbows and unicorns?

Obviously not.

That doesn’t mean every modern interpretation of the Nine of Cups is useless. But it does mean we should occasionally stop repeating definitions we’ve inherited and ask a very simple question: Does this interpretation actually fit the card?

The Waite-Smith deck gives us a remarkably useful visual reality check. If a definition bears little resemblance to the picture, it’s worth questioning the definition.

IS THIS A SHALLOW APPROACH?

There are plenty of self-professed experts who will tell you that the Tarot is incredibly complicated and deep.

And they’re right.

Tarot symbolism can be profound and extremely complex. You can spend years studying these cards and continue finding new layers of meaning in them.

But if you’re a beginning reader, you don’t need to worry about all of that right now.

As time goes by, you may want to take a much deeper dive into the cards. You may want to explore numerology, astrology, Kabbalah, alchemy and the various occult traditions that influenced the Tarot.

That can come later. Fortunately, A. E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith did much of that work for you, and they embedded an enormous amount of it in the deck.

For now, you can do something much simpler.

Pick up the cards. Lay out a reading. Look at the pictures.

What story are they telling you?

That’s where Tarot reading begins.

I also offer a free beginner’s Tarot course here on the website, so if you’re just getting started, you may want to give that a quick read.

But above all, keep it simple.

And keep it fun.

Why Do I Keep Getting the Same Tarot Card Over and Over?

Why does the same Tarot card keep appearing in your readings? A repeating card may point to stuck energy, an important person in your life, or something you haven’t been willing to see. Learn why Tarot sometimes repeats itself—and what that persistent card may be asking you to notice.

One of the spookier things that can happen to a new Tarot reader is getting the same card over and over again.

No matter how many readings you do, there it is. It may drift around to different positions in the spread. It may appear as an answer to completely different questions. You shuffle thoroughly, cut the deck, and perhaps even put the cards away for a few days.

And then you do another reading. There it is again.

It can begin to feel as though the card is glued to your aura.

Oddly enough, this can also be one of the most reassuring experiences in Tarot. There are 78 cards in a standard deck, so when one particular card begins appearing with remarkable persistence, it certainly gets your attention.

So what does it mean?

In my experience, there are three basic reasons a Tarot card may keep appearing:

1. Stuck energy — something in your life isn’t changing.

2. A particular person — someone important is being represented by the card.

3. Something you aren’t acknowledging — an important situation or energy needs your attention.

STUCK ENERGY

A Tarot reading doesn’t really “predict the future.” Instead, it gives us a snapshot of what’s happening in our lives right now and then suggests the probable outcome if those forces continue moving in the same direction.

To use a very simple example, suppose you get the Two of Cups—falling in love—followed by the Three of Swords—heartbreak.

That might suggest that the new romance you’re entering isn’t likely to work out. But that’s not written in stone, because nothing is written in stone. The cards are essentially saying:

“This is where things appear to be heading if nothing changes.”

And nothing changing is one reason certain cards may constantly reappear. If we’re stuck in a loop in which we keep doing the same things over and over, the cards representing that pattern may simply keep coming back.

And here’s the deal: we’re not supposed to stay the same. Human beings are constantly learning, changing and evolving. If the Tarot keeps throwing the same card at you, it may be pointing toward a pattern that needs to change.

In the example above, perhaps you keep falling in love with people who eventually hurt you. At some point, stop looking at them and start looking at yourself.

Why am I doing this? Why am I repeatedly attracted to people who can’t fulfill me or meet my needs?

The repeating Tarot card may not be telling you what is going to happen next. It may be telling you what you keep doing.

PEOPLE

There are times when another person exerts a particularly strong influence on our lives, and we need to be aware of what they’re doing. When that happens, the Tarot may repeatedly produce the same card to represent that person and call our attention to them.

There’s nothing particularly unusual about cards representing people. The Court Cards have traditionally served that function, but other cards can do it as well.

For instance, if you’re involved with someone who is particularly loving and nurturing, The Empress may appear prominently because she embodies those qualities.

I’ve found, though, that repeating cards representing people can become particularly noticeable when there’s conflict involved—when someone else’s actions may be affecting you in ways you need to recognize.

For example, I was once involved in a contested probate, and the Queen of Pentacles reversed kept appearing.

In another context, the reversed Queen of Pentacles might suggest a need for self-nurturing, insecurity around material matters, or energies that have become overly focused on possessions and control.

But when she represents another person, the interpretation can be quite different. As Sasha Fenton rather memorably puts it:

“This lady will win if involved in a fight with the questioner, especially if money is involved.”

That was certainly an interesting card to have repeatedly appearing during a legal dispute over an estate. To me, the message was clear: pay attention to this person. Don’t underestimate her. Money and material interests are central to what’s happening.

So when one card keeps popping up—particularly during a troubled or stressful period—ask yourself:

Could this card represent someone in my life? Is the Tarot pointing a great big flashing neon arrow at someone and saying:

“Pay attention to this one.”

DENIAL

Human beings can go to amazing lengths to avoid seeing something when we really don’t want to see it.

Psychologist Jennifer Freyd coined the term “betrayal blindness” to describe the way people may remain unaware of, or fail to fully acknowledge, betrayal when it threatens an important relationship or situation.

Imagine, for example, a woman whose husband is cheating on her.

The evidence may be sitting right there in plain sight: unexplained motel receipts, long private phone calls, suspicious messages on social media. But somehow she doesn’t put the pieces together.

Then one day something happens and suddenly everything clicks and she asks “How could I have been so blind?”

As the old cliché puts it: “Denial ain’t a river in Egypt.”

And Tarot doesn’t seem to have much patience with denial. If there’s something in your life that is vitally important for you to acknowledge and deal with, the cards may keep pointing toward it over and over again until you’re finally willing to look.

In the situation we just described, perhaps the Seven of Swords—traditionally associated with secrecy, deception and things happening behind the scenes—keeps appearing.

At first, the woman may be genuinely puzzled. “What in the world does that have to do with me?”

But the card keeps coming back.

Seven of Swords.

Eventually, instead of asking what the card means, she begins asking a much more useful question: “What am I not seeing?”

And that’s when she may finally start noticing those motel receipts.

TAKE THE BLINDERS OFF

If we wanted to sum all of this up in one sentence, it might simply be: Take the blinders off.

Or perhaps: take off the rose-colored glasses.

When the Tarot repeatedly gives us the same card, the most useful response isn’t necessarily to reshuffle the deck and ask the question again.

It’s to stop. Look at the card.

And ask yourself: Why does this particular message keep coming back?

Am I stuck in a pattern? Does this card represent someone who is having an important influence on my life? Is there something happening that I don’t want to acknowledge?

Sometimes the card that won’t go away is precisely the card we most need to understand.

Tarot can be remarkably patient. It can whisper the same message very gently for a very long time. But it can also be remarkably persistent.

At a certain point, you have a choice: deal with the issue—or quit asking the cards about it.

What you can’t do is keep asking the same question and expect the Tarot to tell you something different.

Should You Read Reversed Tarot Cards Differently?

Should you interpret reversed Tarot cards differently—or simply turn them upright and read them normally? This post explores both approaches, including reversals as blocked, weakened, excessive, or inwardly directed energy, and shows how understanding the card’s basic energy can make reversals far easier to interpret.

You turn over a Tarot card and there it is:

The Empress—upside down.

Now what?

If you’re new to Tarot, reversed cards can make an already complicated subject seem twice as difficult. You finally begin learning the meanings of 78 cards, only to discover that some books provide an entirely separate meaning for every card when it appears reversed.

Suddenly it seems as though you’re expected to memorize 156 Tarot cards. Fortunately, you aren’t.

The real question isn’t whether you should read a reversed card. Obviously, the card is still part of the reading. The question is whether you should interpret that card differently because it appeared upside down.

Some Tarot readers do. Others simply turn the card upright and interpret it normally, allowing the question, its position in the spread and the surrounding cards to determine which aspects of the card apply. Neither approach is inherently right or wrong.

So let’s look at what reversals can add to a reading—and whether you actually need them.

WHAT IS A REVERSED TAROT CARD?

A reversed card is simply a Tarot card that appears upside down in a reading.

Some readers deliberately shuffle their decks so that cards can appear in either direction and consider the reversed orientation part of the message. Other readers don’t assign any special significance to orientation. If a card appears upside down, they simply turn it upright and read the card normally.

This doesn’t mean they’re ignoring the reversed card or rejecting its more difficult meanings. Quite the opposite. They consider those meanings to be already contained within the card.

For example, The Emperor can represent healthy structure, leadership and stability. But Emperor energy can also become rigid, authoritarian and controlling. A reader who uses reversals might associate some of those more difficult qualities with The Emperor reversed.

A reader who doesn’t use reversals may see exactly the same qualities in an upright Emperor, depending upon the question and the card’s position in the spread. The difference isn’t necessarily in what the card can mean. It’s in how the reader determines which meaning applies.

WHAT DOES A REVERSED CARD MEAN?

Here’s where things become interesting.

There is no single rule.

A reversed card might suggest that the upright energy is:

* Blocked or frustrated

* Weakened

* Excessive or out of balance

* Turned inward

* Delayed or incomplete

* Being resisted

* Expressing its more difficult or shadow qualities

Occasionally, the reversed card may even suggest something close to the opposite of its usual meaning.

That’s much more sophisticated than simply saying: Upright = good. Reversed = bad. In fact, some reversed cards can be quite encouraging.

The Devil reversed might suggest breaking free from an unhealthy attachment. The Eight of Swords reversed might indicate recognizing that you aren’t nearly as trapped as you believed.

Meanwhile, an apparently wonderful card such as The Sun reversed could suggest that happiness is available but something is preventing you from fully experiencing it.

Reversals aren’t necessarily negative. They can simply show us that something unusual is happening to the card’s energy.

REVERSALS AS BLOCKED ENERGY

One of the easiest ways to begin working with reversals is to think of them as blocked energy.

Every Tarot card represents a particular kind of energy or experience.

The Magician wants to create.

The Empress wants to nurture.

The Chariot wants to move forward.

The Star wants to shine.

When one of those cards appears reversed, we can ask: What is preventing this energy from expressing itself naturally?

The reversed Magician might suggest unused ability or uncertainty about your own power.

The reversed Empress might indicate difficulty nurturing yourself—or nurturing everyone else until you’ve exhausted yourself.

The reversed Chariot might represent plenty of effort but no clear direction.

The reversed Star might indicate that your light is still there, but you’ve temporarily lost confidence in it.

The original meaning of the card hasn’t disappeared. Something has happened to it.

SOMETIMES THERE’S TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING

A reversal can also suggest excess. Sometimes the problem isn’t too little of the card’s energy. It’s too much.

The Emperor’s structure can become rigid control.

The Hermit’s solitude can become isolation.

The Four of Pentacles’ stability can become possessiveness.

The Knight of Swords’ determination can become reckless action.

In this approach, the reversed card acts almost like a warning light: This energy has moved out of balance. That’s particularly useful in psychological or self-development readings because a reversal can reveal where an otherwise healthy quality has become exaggerated.

REVERSALS CAN TURN THE ENERGY INWARD

There’s another way of interpreting reversals that I particularly like.

Sometimes an upright card can represent energy being expressed in the external world, while the reversed card suggests that the same process is taking place internally.

The Queen of Cups upright might describe compassion and emotional sensitivity directed toward other people. Reversed, she might ask you to direct some of that compassion toward yourself.

The Magician upright might indicate using your abilities to create something in the world. Reversed, he might suggest discovering abilities within yourself that haven’t yet found outward expression.

This interpretation won’t work for every card or every reading. But that’s the point. Reversals aren’t formulas. They’re additional information.

DO REVERSED CARDS MEAN THE OPPOSITE?

Sometimes—but I wouldn’t make that the automatic assumption.

Consider The Hermit. Upright, The Hermit can represent solitude, contemplation and turning inward in search of wisdom.

If we simply reverse that meaning, does The Hermit reversed mean being sociable and going to a party? Probably not. It might indicate too much isolation.

Or perhaps the person desperately needs solitude but isn’t getting it.

Maybe they’ve found something during their period of introspection that now needs to be brought back into the world.

Instead of asking:

What’s the opposite of The Hermit?

Try asking: What has happened to the energy of The Hermit?

That opens considerably more interesting possibilities.

WHY SOME READERS DON’T USE REVERSALS

There’s a very good argument for not assigning reversed cards separate meanings: The Tarot already contains an enormous range of human experience.

We certainly don’t have a shortage of difficult cards.

The Tower, Devil, Three of Swords, Five of Pentacles and Ten of Swords are perfectly capable of telling us when something has gone wrong.

More importantly, every Tarot card already contains both light and shadow.

The Emperor can represent healthy structure or oppressive control.

The Hermit can represent valuable solitude or unhealthy isolation.

The Moon can represent intuition or confusion.

The Four of Pentacles can represent financial stability or fearfully clinging to what you possess.

You don’t necessarily need to turn a card upside down to access those meanings. The question being asked, the position of the card within the spread and the cards surrounding it can provide the context.

That’s why a reader who doesn’t use reversals isn’t reading only the “positive half” of Tarot. They’re reading the entire spectrum of meaning contained within each upright card.

BUT REVERSALS HAVE ONE BIG ADVANTAGE

They get your attention.

Suppose The Emperor appears in a position labeled: What’s preventing me from moving forward?

Even upright, that position tells us that some aspect of Emperor energy may be causing difficulty. Perhaps there’s too much structure, too much control or an unwillingness to deviate from the plan.

But if The Emperor appears reversed, we receive an additional visual signal: Something about this energy isn’t functioning normally.

A reversed card interrupts the visual flow of a spread. It makes us stop and look again. It’s almost as though Tarot has underlined the card.

And that can be extremely useful.

WHAT IF HALF THE READING IS REVERSED?

This is where reversals can become more interesting than individual card meanings.

If one card is reversed, look closely at that card. If most of the spread is reversed, look at the pattern.

Perhaps the situation is stalled. Perhaps there’s tremendous internal activity but very little outward movement. Perhaps someone is resisting change. Perhaps energy is being blocked in several different areas.

Or perhaps you accidentally turned half the deck upside down while shuffling.

Never underestimate the mystical power of bad shuffling.

SHOULD BEGINNERS USE REVERSALS?

I’d suggest learning the basic meanings of the cards first.

Not because reversals are especially difficult, but because understanding the fundamental energy of a card makes its reversal much easier to interpret.

If you understand The Chariot as directed movement, determination and willpower, you don’t need to memorize an entirely separate paragraph for The Chariot reversed.

You can simply ask: What happens when Chariot energy isn’t working properly?

Maybe there’s no direction.

Maybe determination has become obsession.

Maybe you’re trying to control something that can’t be controlled.

Maybe you’re pushing ahead when you should stop.

Now you aren’t memorizing another Tarot definition. You’re thinking about the card. And that’s ultimately a much better way to learn Tarot.

SO—SHOULD YOU INTERPRET REVERSED CARDS DIFFERENTLY?

You don’t have to.

If a reversed card appears, you can turn it upright and interpret the full range of meanings contained within that card. The question, spread position and surrounding cards can tell you whether its constructive or difficult qualities are being expressed.

Or you can leave it reversed and treat its orientation as one more piece of information in the reading.

Neither method gives you a more “authentic” Tarot reading. They’re simply different systems.

If you do choose to use reversals, however, I think there’s a much more useful question than: “What does this card mean upside down?”

Ask instead: “What has happened to the energy of this card?”

Is it blocked? Weakened? Exaggerated? Turned inward? Delayed? Being resisted?

Once you begin thinking about reversals that way, you don’t have another 78 definitions to memorize.

You simply have another way of looking at the 78 cards you already know.

Doing Inner Child Work With the Tarot

Can Tarot help us understand the childhood we’ve forgotten? This Inner Child Tarot spread uses ten cards to explore the emotional world of your younger self—your home, caregivers, fears, needs, coping strategies, and the beliefs you carried into adulthood. Most importantly, it asks not only what your Inner Child needs from you, but what gifts your Inner Child may still be waiting to give you.

I like to think of the Six of Cups as the Inner Child card. It evokes nostalgia, childhood joy, innocence and the memory of a safe, comforting place.

But what if our childhood wasn’t safe and sweet?

One of the most interesting things about the Tarot is that we can use it to read the past as well as the future. That may sound a little paradoxical. After all, we KNOW our past already, don’t we? We lived it, so surely we ought to remember it.

Frequently, though, we don’t.

Doing Inner Child work can be frustrating because there may be whole stretches of childhood that we remember only vaguely—or seemingly not at all. Sometimes difficult or traumatic experiences leave memories that are fragmented, confused or difficult to access. A child may also have been too young to understand what was happening or to put it into words.

And sometimes we’re dealing with experiences that occurred before we had the language or conceptual ability to make sense of them. The child experienced the fear, loneliness, confusion or joy, but couldn’t create the coherent story that the adult mind expects to find later.

So our past can sometimes seem almost as blank and mysterious as our future.

And that’s where the Tarot can become interesting. Rather than using the cards to establish exactly what happened, we can use their symbolic language to explore the emotional landscape of the child we once were.

THE INNER CHILD READING

This simple ten-card reading can be used to explore a period of childhood that feels distant, unclear or emotionally significant. For this example, let’s imagine that we’re trying to understand ourselves at the age of eight.

1. The Child

Who was I at eight? Begin with the child herself, before considering everything that was happening around her. Don’t assume that the eight-year-old you was simply a smaller version of the person you are today. The intervening years may have made you remarkably strong, while the eight-year-old was frightened and vulnerable.

Or perhaps the opposite is true. Maybe the eight-year-old was a fearless little artist, explorer or dreamer whose creativity was gradually pushed underground.

Who was that child before the world finished teaching her who she was supposed to be?

2. The Home

What was the emotional atmosphere of my home? Was home a refuge or a place of anxiety? Was it warm and affectionate, emotionally distant, chaotic or unpredictable?

Did you feel free to relax and simply be a child, or did you need to remain alert to the moods and reactions of the people around you?

3. The Parents or Caregivers

How did I experience the adults responsible for me?

Notice that the question isn’t whether your caregivers were objectively “good” or “bad.” We’re interested in how the child experienced them.

You may have had genuinely loving parents who were nevertheless exhausted, overwhelmed or stretched too thin. Their intentions may have been loving while the child still experienced loneliness or neglect.

The Tarot card describes the child’s world.

4. School and the Outside World

How did I experience teachers, classmates, rules, achievement and the larger social world?

Was school exciting or frightening? Were you accepted by other children, or did you feel different from them? Were you encouraged by teachers, bullied by classmates, praised for achievement or made to feel that you could never quite measure up?

For many children, school is the first sustained encounter with a world beyond the family. What did that world teach you about yourself?

5. What I Needed

What emotional or psychological need was strongest at that age?

Perhaps you needed recognition, affection, protection or encouragement. Maybe you needed someone to listen to you. Or perhaps what you desperately needed was simply peace and quiet.

Try not to judge the need. Ask instead whether the child received enough of it.

6. What I Feared

What made the eight-year-old feel unsafe, ashamed, rejected, powerless or uncertain?

Did you feel secure at home? Were the adults around you supportive or critical? Did you fear failure, punishment, abandonment or humiliation? Sometimes childhood fears seem trivial to the adult mind. They weren’t trivial to the child experiencing them.

7. How I Adapted

What strategy did I develop to navigate that world?

This may be one of the most revealing cards in the reading. Perhaps you learned to become invisible. Maybe you became the good child, the funny child, the successful child, the rebellious child or the child who took care of everybody else.

Perhaps you escaped into books, art, fantasy or imagination.

What did the “little you” learn to do in order to function in the world?

8. What I Believed About Myself

What conclusion did the child draw from all of this?

This may be the heart of the reading.

Children naturally try to make sense of their experiences, but they don’t have an adult’s perspective. A child who isn’t receiving enough attention may not conclude, “My mother is exhausted and overwhelmed.” The child may conclude, “I’m not important.”

Those childhood conclusions can quietly become the beliefs through which we interpret our adult lives.

9. What I Carried Forward

What belief, behavior or emotional pattern formed then that the adult still carries?

Perhaps you learned to please everyone else while putting your own needs last. Maybe you learned never to ask for help, never to appear vulnerable or always to prove your worth through achievement.

The important question is whether the strategy that helped the child is still serving the adult.

10. What the Child Still Has to Give Me

What survived intact?

This card isn’t about what needs fixing. It’s about imagination, courage, sensitivity, humor, curiosity, independence, creativity, playfulness and wonder.

That’s another side of the Six of Cups that we sometimes overlook. Your Inner Child isn’t merely carrying wounds. Your Inner Child is carrying gifts.

What did that child possess that you need to reclaim?

TAROT IS NOT A MEMORY-RECOVERY DEVICE

There’s an important caution to all of this.

Tarot speaks through symbols, associations, emotions and intuition. A card may unexpectedly trigger an image, feeling or apparent memory, but that doesn’t establish that the event literally happened in the way we imagine it.

We’re exploring our experience of the past, not conducting a historical investigation.

Memory itself is reconstructive and imperfect, and attempts to recover supposedly hidden memories can sometimes produce sincere but inaccurate conclusions. That’s particularly important when a reading seems to suggest abuse or another serious event that you don’t independently remember.

The feeling may be real and worth exploring. The interpretation of its cause may or may not be.

If you’re dealing with a particularly traumatic childhood or powerful memories begin emerging during this kind of work, consider exploring them with a qualified mental-health professional rather than relying upon the Tarot to determine what happened.

And don’t be shy about it. Take your Tarot cards to your next therapy session.

RECEIVING THE GIFT FROM YOUR INNER CHILD

Too often, Inner Child work focuses entirely on what went wrong.

Sometimes that’s necessary. If we were mistreated, frightened, ignored or neglected as children, understanding those experiences can help us stop interpreting their consequences as evidence that something was inherently wrong with us.

But eventually another question becomes possible.

Instead of asking only: What went wrong? We can begin asking: What can I understand now that I couldn’t understand then?

And finally: What does that child still have to give me?

Perhaps that’s the deeper message of the Six of Cups. The child we once were isn’t simply waiting somewhere in the past to be rescued. She may also be waiting there with something we left behind.

The World – The Dance of Life

The World marks the completion of the Tarot’s great journey—but every ending contains a new beginning. Explore the card’s mysterious wands, its connection to The Fool and The Magician, and the symbolism of dance, rebirth, integration, and divine play.

As the final card of the Major Arcana, The World is both the end of a cycle and the beginning of a new one.

Yes, we’ve come to the end of the long journey through the archetypes. The lessons have been learned, the trials endured, and the pieces brought together. But Tarot doesn’t really have an ending. The moment one journey is completed, another begins.

The World isn’t a period.

It’s a doorway.

THE WREATH — COMPLETION AND REBIRTH

The most obvious symbol of completion is the enormous wreath surrounding the central figure.

But look at its peculiar shape. Rather than being perfectly circular, the wreath forms a long oval. It can easily suggest an opening, a portal—and perhaps even the shape of the birth canal.

Seen that way, the figure isn’t simply standing triumphantly inside a wreath celebrating what she has accomplished. She’s passing through it. She’s arriving at the destination and simultaneously being born into another world.

That’s one of the great paradoxes of The World: completion and beginning are the same event. Every genuine transformation eventually requires us to leave behind the person who began the journey.

THE FOOL, THE WORLD, AND THE DANCE OF LIFE

At the very beginning of the Tarot journey we encountered The Fool.

He’s filled with such exuberance that he practically dances toward the edge of a cliff. He doesn’t know where he’s going. He hasn’t experienced the Magician, the Lovers, Death, the Devil, the Tower, the Moon or any of the other archetypal encounters awaiting him.

He simply steps forward.

Now look at the figure in The World.

She’s dancing, too. But this is a very different dance. The Fool dances because he doesn’t yet know what lies ahead. The World dances because she does.

She has traveled through the entire cycle and somehow recovered the joyous freedom with which she began it.

This idea has a fascinating parallel in Hindu philosophy.

Shiva as Nataraja—the Lord of the Dance—is portrayed dancing within a great circle of flame. His dance represents the ceaseless movement of existence: creation, preservation, destruction and renewal.

The visual resemblance to The World is striking: a dancing figure surrounded by a circular boundary representing something vastly larger than the individual.

Hindu traditions also give us the wonderful concept of līlā, usually translated as “divine play.” Līlā suggests that creation doesn’t necessarily arise because the divine lacks something or needs to accomplish some desperately important objective. Creation can be understood as spontaneous expression—something closer to art, music, play or dance.

An artist paints. A musician plays. A dancer dances. Creation creates.

This doesn’t mean that suffering is unreal or that life should never be taken seriously. It suggests something subtler: beneath all our struggling, planning and attempts to control events, there may be another way of participating in existence.

We can dance with it.

The woman in The World is being born into something new, but she isn’t grimacing with effort. She’s having a hell of a lot of fun doing it.

THE MAGICIAN, THE WORLD, AND INTEGRATION

There’s another fascinating connection between The World and one of the earliest cards in the Major Arcana.

The woman holds two peculiar short, double-ended wands loosely in her hands. We’ve seen that wand before. The Magician holds one.

But notice the difference in how the two figures use them.

The Magician raises his wand deliberately toward heaven while pointing his other hand toward Earth. His entire posture communicates intention:

I will make something happen.

He channels divine power into manifestation. He gathers the four elemental tools before him and consciously directs his will.

The World no longer needs to do that. She holds two wands, perfectly balanced on either side of her body. She isn’t pointing them anywhere. She isn’t commanding anything. She almost seems to be playing with them.

They’ve become part of the dance.

The Magician uses magic. The World embodies it.

At the beginning of the journey, we have to learn that we possess creative power. We have to discover intention, will, concentration and the ability to shape our lives. But perhaps there comes a point when even that must be surrendered.

The Magician says: I am creating my world.

The World says: I am the creation.

The World Tarot Poster – Available on etsy

THE MAGIC CIRCLE

Now notice the four mysterious figures occupying the corners of the card: the human or angel, eagle, bull and lion.

They have a long symbolic history extending far beyond Tarot, but within the Tarot’s esoteric correspondences they can be associated with the four fixed signs of the zodiac:

Aquarius — Air

Scorpio — Water

Taurus — Earth

Leo — Fire

Once again, all four elements are present. We encountered them on the Magician’s table at the beginning of the journey. Now they surround The World.

This gives the card an almost ritual quality. In Western ceremonial magic, the four directions and their elemental correspondences can be invoked around a ritual space. Symbolically, then, we can imagine the dancing woman standing within a great magic circle surrounded by the forces of creation.

But something has fundamentally changed.

The Magician stood before the elements and manipulated their symbols. The World dances among them.

Mind, emotion, body and spirit are no longer competing forces that need to be brought under control. They have become parts of a larger whole. That is integration.

And perhaps that’s what The World ultimately means by completion. Not perfection. Not reaching a place where nothing difficult will ever happen again.

Wholeness.

WHEN THE WORLD APPEARS IN YOUR READING

When The World appears in a reading, something has come full circle.

A long process may be reaching completion. You may finally understand something that once confused you, finish something you’ve worked toward for a long time, or realize that you’ve simply outgrown a particular chapter of your life.

But don’t mistake completion for stagnation. The World almost always contains the seed of what comes next.

You may be standing at exactly that strange threshold where you can look backward and say, “I’ve finished,” while simultaneously looking forward and realizing, “Now I begin again.”

The card can also indicate integration. Pieces of yourself that once seemed contradictory may finally be learning to coexist. The intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual parts of your life may be finding their proper relationship with one another.

And sometimes The World offers an even simpler message:

Stop trying so hard to control the dance.

You’ve learned more than you realize. You have the tools. You’ve survived the journey.

Now loosen your grip on the wands.

Listen for the music.

And dance.

The Judgement Card and Starting a New Cycle

Judgement card,Judgement tarot card,Judgement in a tarot reading,Judgement card definition, Judgement card meaning, tarot major arcana, self judgement, the judgement card and reincarnation,Judgement Day,gabriel angel, tarot lesson, tarot blog, tarot books

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.

THE SUN — JOY WITHOUT EFFORT

The Sun represents far more than happiness and success. Through the mysterious symbolism of the child, white horse, enormous red banner, stone wall, and radiant sun, the card reveals a deeper state of being—innocence without naïveté, power without force, balance without control, and joy that arises naturally when we finally stop struggling against ourselves.

The Sun is one of the most immediately joyful cards in the Tarot.

Everything about it seems to announce happiness. A brilliant sun fills the sky. Sunflowers rise above a stone wall. A white horse moves peacefully through the scene, carrying a laughing child who waves an enormous red banner.

Traditionally, The Sun is associated with happiness, vitality, success, clarity, and optimism. All of those meanings are perfectly valid. But they don’t really explain the picture.

Why is the central figure a naked child? Why is the child riding without reins? Why does Pamela Colman Smith give this tiny figure a banner far larger than any child could reasonably carry? And why is a stone wall standing in the middle of this otherwise exuberant landscape?

Perhaps Smith is showing us something much more profound than happiness.

Perhaps The Sun depicts what happens when we finally stop struggling against ourselves.

THE CHILD WHO COMES AT THE END OF THE JOURNEY

It is tempting to look at the child in The Sun and think immediately of the modern concept of the inner child. There is certainly some resonance there, but the placement of The Sun within the Major Arcana suggests something deeper.

This child appears very late in the Tarot journey. We have already passed through The Devil, confronted The Tower, stood naked beneath The Star, and traveled through the strange nocturnal landscape of The Moon.

This is therefore not the innocence of someone who has never encountered darkness. It is innocence recovered after encountering it.

That distinction is important.

The Fool is innocent because the journey has barely begun. The figure in The Sun has traveled through nearly the entire Major Arcana.

This is not naïveté. It is simplicity on the other side of complexity.

The child can therefore be understood as something closer to the ancient archetype of the Divine Child: something newly born within us that appears small and vulnerable while possessing extraordinary power.

The personality has not returned to childhood. It has rediscovered something child-like.

Naturalness.

Spontaneity.

Trust.

Wonder.

Joy.

NAKED IN THE SUNLIGHT

The child’s nudity reinforces the idea.

There is nothing to hide.

Throughout the Tarot, people wear costumes that tell us who they are. Kings have crowns. Priests have robes. Warriors wear armor. The Emperor sits dressed in the symbols of authority.

The child in The Sun has none of them. No rank. No profession. No armor. No social identity.

Nothing stands between the child and the world.

This is especially striking after The Moon.

Under moonlight, appearances become uncertain. A rope can look like a snake. The familiar becomes strange. Material rises from the unconscious in dreams, fears, fantasies, intuitions, and projections.

The Sun changes the light.

Nothing needs to remain hidden because everything can now be seen clearly. And the figure who emerges into that illumination has nothing left to conceal.

WHO IS RIDING WHOM?

Then there is the horse.

At first glance, we naturally say that the child is riding it.

But look again.

There are no reins. The child isn’t gripping the horse with her legs. In fact, her legs kick exuberantly outward. She isn’t clutching the mane or concentrating on maintaining control. She appears almost unconcerned with the mechanics of riding.

Perhaps the child isn’t controlling the horse at all. Perhaps the horse is carrying the child.

That gives us an entirely different image of power.

The horse can represent the animal nature—the body, instinct, appetite, physical energy, and all those parts of ourselves that conscious thought so often tries to control.

The Sun offers another possibility.

The child doesn’t dominate instinct. She trusts it. Horse and rider are in balance without visible control.

There is no struggle between the conscious and instinctive self because they are no longer trying to go in different directions.

POWER WITHOUT FORCE

This brings The Sun surprisingly close to the Taoist concept of wu wei—often translated as effortless action or action without forcing.

The child accomplishes everything without apparent effort.

And nowhere is that more obvious than in the enormous red banner. Look at its size. It is absurdly large.

The artist understood human proportions perfectly well. A child that size should struggle even to keep such a large flag upright, particularly while sitting unsecured on a moving horse.

Instead, the child casually holds it aloft with one hand while it billows dramatically across the sky. This tiny figure possesses outsized power.

But there is no evidence of effort. No straining muscles. No grim determination. No attempt to demonstrate strength.

The child doesn’t act powerful. She simply is.

Perhaps this is one of the central mysteries of The Sun: The Sun is not the power of forcing things to happen. It is the power that becomes available when we stop fighting ourselves.

THE RED BANNER

The banner itself deserves attention.

Its brilliant red is almost discordant against the yellows, whites, blues, and grays dominating the rest of the card. It demands to be noticed.

Red is the color of blood, heat, passion, vitality, and physical existence. It is the color of life.

And the child doesn’t hide that vitality. She raises it above her head and lets it unfurl across the sky.

The gesture is almost declarative. I am here.

After the uncertainty and ambiguity of The Moon, there is no hesitation about existence in The Sun. Life announces itself.

THE WALL

And then we come to that peculiar stone wall.

Why place a wall in this scene at all?

Walls divide. They establish boundaries between what is inside and what is outside, what is permitted and what is excluded, what is protected and what is kept away.

Behind the wall are the sunflowers. In front of it are the child and horse.

Something has crossed a boundary. She has simply emerged beyond it.

We might think of that wall as all the things that have separated us from our natural selves: conditioning, fear, social expectations, defensive structures, old beliefs, and identities we once needed but eventually outgrew.

The Sun doesn’t necessarily destroy them. It illuminates them and moves beyond them.

THE FLOWERS THAT SEEK THE LIGHT

Behind the wall are four enormous sunflowers. Their symbolism could hardly be more appropriate.

Sunflowers turn toward the light. They suggest the natural movement of life toward illumination—not because someone commands it, but because that is simply what the organism does.

And perhaps that is another clue to the entire card. Nothing in The Sun seems to be trying very hard.

The sun shines because that is its nature.

The flowers turn toward it because that is their nature.

The horse carries the child because horse and rider are moving together.

The banner flies because the wind catches it.

And the child rejoices because joy has become natural.

Everything is doing what it does without struggling to become something else.

JOY WITHOUT A REASON

This also helps explain the extraordinary joy of The Sun.

We often think of happiness as something caused by circumstances.

We will be happy when we get the job. When we find the relationship. When the money arrives. When the problem disappears.

But nothing identifiable has happened to make this child happy. There is no treasure chest. No victorious army. No palace. No admiring crowd.

She is simply alive beneath the Sun. Her joy seems to arise from being completely at home in herself.

That may be why the card feels so different from ordinary images of success.

The child isn’t celebrating an achievement.

She is celebrating existence.

WHEN THE SUN APPEARS IN YOUR READING

The Sun can certainly indicate the traditional qualities associated with it: happiness, success, vitality, confidence, clarity, and favorable circumstances.

But on a deeper level, it may ask a more interesting question:

What would happen if you stopped fighting yourself?

Perhaps you don’t need another layer of control. Perhaps you don’t need more armor. Perhaps you don’t need to force the horse to go where it already knows how to go.

The Sun can appear when something authentic is ready to emerge from behind the walls that have contained it.

It encourages trust in your own nature. It asks you to allow yourself to be seen.

And it reminds you that genuine power does not always announce itself through effort, dominance, or control.

Sometimes power looks like a tiny naked child carrying an impossibly enormous banner while a horse gently carries her into the sunlight.

She is small without being weak. She is vulnerable without being afraid. She is powerful without exerting force. She is balanced without needing control.

And she is joyful without needing a reason.

That is the illumination of The Sun.

THE MOON — DON’T MISTAKE MOONLIGHT FOR DAYLIGHT

The Moon is traditionally associated with illusion, uncertainty, and blurred reality—but why? By exploring the card’s dreaming face, open gateways, howling dog and wolf, and the strange creature rising from the water, we uncover a deeper meaning: The Moon represents those moments when subconscious fears, desires, memories, and intuitions begin coloring our perception of reality. The road is still there—we’re simply seeing it by moonlight.

The Moon is traditionally one of the more unsettling cards in the Tarot.

Illusion. Confusion. Deception. Uncertainty. Blurred reality. Things are not quite what they seem.

Those are perfectly good definitions, but they leave us with a question: Why? Why does the Tarot choose this particular collection of images to represent those ideas?

There is a pool of water with a strange crustacean crawling out of it. A dog and a wolf howl at the Moon. A road passes between two towers and winds away through an empty landscape. Strange drops of energy fall from the sky.

And above everything hangs an enormous Moon containing a human face.

Perhaps the key to understanding the entire card is right there.

The Moon’s eyes are closed.

THE DREAMING MOON

Look carefully at the Moon’s face. It isn’t screaming or displaying terror. It appears troubled, perhaps even melancholy, but its eyes remain firmly closed.

Nighttime. Moonlight. Closed eyes.

The Moon is dreaming. And perhaps it isn’t experiencing a nightmare so much as a troubled dream—the kind in which uncomfortable material from somewhere below consciousness begins working its way toward the surface.

That gives us a very different way of approaching the card.

During ordinary waking consciousness, we maintain a reasonably firm distinction between the world outside us and the world inside us. We distinguish memories from present events, imagination from observation, fears from facts.

Dreaming changes all of that.

The boundaries become porous. Memories mingle with fantasies. Fears become characters. Emotions become landscapes. People who died twenty years ago walk through the front door. Places we’ve never visited somehow feel completely familiar.

The subconscious speaks—but it speaks in its own peculiar language. And while we’re dreaming, we generally accept all of this as reality.

THE GATES ARE WIDE OPEN

The two towers in The Moon are usually interpreted as something we must pass through on our journey along the road.

But suppose we’ve been traveling in the wrong direction.

There is no obvious destination at the distant end of the road. The Tarot frequently used radiant light and other visual devices to suggest a glorious destination or spiritual attainment.

There is nothing like that here.

So what happens if we reverse direction?

Suppose we are traveling toward the pool rather than away from it.

Suddenly the towers become an entrance. And there’s something peculiar about that entrance: It’s wide open. The towers are separated by a broad expanse of land. There is no wall connecting them. No gate. No guardhouse. No barrier.

Nothing prevents us from entering.

That makes wonderful psychological sense if the landscape represents a dream—or, more broadly, a state in which the subconscious is becoming unusually active.

The gates between conscious and subconscious experience are open.

THE DOG AND THE WOLF

Just inside those gates we encounter two closely related animals: a dog and a wolf.

The wolf represents the primitive animal—the creature governed by instinct. The dog is essentially that same creature after thousands of years of domestication. It has learned the rules. It has adapted itself to human civilization.

Psychologically, the pairing is almost irresistible.

The wolf can represent our primal self: instinct, appetite, fear, aggression and everything else civilization has taught us to restrain. The dog can represent our conditioned self—perhaps even the ego attempting to maintain order.

And what does a guard dog do when something approaches the boundary?

It barks.

Both animals are howling at the Moon. The intruder is the subconscious material and that’s what the wolf and dog are trying to keep out.

The ego may try to keep the contents of the subconscious at bay, but under the influence of The Moon, it cannot maintain complete control.

SOMETHING IS COMING OUT OF THE WATER

Then we reach the pool.

Water has long been associated with the subconscious and emotional realms, and the Tarot places it prominently at the bottom of the card.

And something is crawling out of it.

The strange crayfish or lobsterlike creature appears almost prehistoric. It belongs to a much older world than either the dog or wolf.

If the pool represents the subconscious, this creature can represent something equally ancient within ourselves: primitive psychological material that predates our carefully constructed conscious identity.

And it is rising.

The Moon, of course, controls the tides. The Tarot imagery therefore gives us a marvelous metaphor: the Moon is drawing something out of the depths. Out of our depths.

Something normally submerged is coming to the surface.

That may be a forgotten memory. An instinct. A fear. A desire. An intuition. An old emotional wound. A creative image. Something we know without knowing how we know it.

The important point is that it has crossed—or is crossing—the boundary into consciousness.

WHAT IS A “MOON-LIKE” STATE?

This is where the symbolism becomes much broader than ordinary dreaming.

We might think of The Moon as depicting any Moon-like condition in which ordinary conscious control is weakened and subconscious material begins exerting an unusually powerful influence over our perception.

Dreaming is the most obvious example, but it isn’t the only one.

Intense anxiety can create a Moon-like state. So can grief, infatuation, obsession, fantasy, emotional overwhelm, trance, intense creativity and other experiences in which our interior world becomes unusually powerful.

And that’s when perception becomes tricky. Because we aren’t necessarily hallucinating something that doesn’t exist. More often, we’re interpreting something real through the light of our subconscious mind.

THE ROPE AND THE SNAKE

Imagine walking outside at night and seeing something long and curved lying across the path.

In daylight, you would immediately recognize it as a rope. But under uncertain moonlight, it looks remarkably like a snake. Your heart pounds. Your body tenses. You stop walking.

The rope is real.

The darkness is real.

Your fear is certainly real.

The snake isn’t.

Your subconscious has taken incomplete sensory information and supplied the rest.

That is The Moon.

And we do precisely the same thing psychologically.

An employer sends an email saying, “Could you come see me this afternoon?” If you’re already worried about losing your job, your subconscious may immediately finish the story. I’m getting fired.

Someone you love seems unusually quiet. They’re angry with me.

A new romantic interest doesn’t answer a message. They’re losing interest.

In each case, something actually happened. But subconscious fear, desire or expectation supplied information we didn’t possess.

The feeling may be real. The interpretation may not be.

BUT SOMETIMES THE SNAKE REALLY IS A SNAKE

And this is where The Moon becomes more interesting than a simple warning against illusion.

The subconscious isn’t necessarily wrong. Sometimes what we call intuition may be the subconscious assembling information the conscious mind hasn’t yet recognized.

Perhaps that quiet person really is angry. Perhaps something actually is wrong at work.

Perhaps some tiny combination of expression, tone of voice and behavior has registered below conscious awareness and produced the unmistakable feeling that something isn’t right.

That is why intuition belongs to The Moon just as surely as illusion does.

The problem is that under moonlight it can be extraordinarily difficult to distinguish between them.

Is this intuition—or fear? Am I perceiving something—or projecting something? Do I know this—or merely feel it very strongly?

The Moon doesn’t necessarily answer those questions.

It tells us that we need to ask them.

WHEN THE MOON APPEARS IN A READING

When The Moon appears, we don’t necessarily need to assume that somebody is lying to us or that everything around us is an illusion. Instead, the card may be telling us that subconscious material is strongly coloring our perception of the situation.

Something may be rising from the depths that deserves our attention. But this probably isn’t the moment to accept every fear, intuition, fantasy or suspicion as objective fact.

Ask yourself:

What do I actually know?

What am I assuming?

What am I afraid might be true?

What do I want to be true?

Is an old experience influencing how I interpret the present one?

Could my intuition be noticing something my conscious mind hasn’t recognized yet?

And perhaps most importantly:

Do I have enough light to see this clearly yet?

Sometimes we simply have to wait until we can see more clearly.

The lesson of The Moon may not be that we should distrust everything we experience in darkness. Dreams, emotions, instincts and intuitions can contain profound truths.

But they speak the symbolic language of the subconscious, and that language shouldn’t always be taken literally.

A rope may look like a snake.

A fear may masquerade as intuition.

And intuition may arrive disguised as an irrational fear.

The road is still there.

We simply have to remember that we’re seeing it by moonlight.

The Star and Shining Bright in Our Lives

The Star Card as the reborn self.

To paraphrase a wonderful movie:

“What does a star do? It shines.”

And that is precisely what The Star in the Tarot portrays: our ability to shine our light into the world around us.

Through a Jungian lens, the Tarot can be read as a visual map of individuation—the lifelong process of bringing the conscious and unconscious parts of ourselves into a more complete and integrated whole.

The Star represents an important moment in that journey. Something inside us has come together. Mind, spirit, emotion, and instinct are no longer fighting one another quite so fiercely. We have begun to understand who we are.

And now we’re ready to share it.

The Star isn’t searching for her light. She is the light.

THE STAR AND THE TOWER

The Star appears immediately after The Tower. There is no coincidence in that sequence.

As we recently discussed, The Tower can depict not merely the destruction of circumstances in our outer world, but the collapse of the psychological structures we have built around ourselves.

The Tower takes everything false, everything unsustainable, everything inauthentic—and burns it right to the ground.

But inherent in that destruction is the possibility of rebirth. When there is nothing left, we have to start over. And when we start over, we have the opportunity to rebuild our lives on something more authentic.

To quote the old Kris Kristofferson line made famous by Janis Joplin:

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

That is precisely where The Star enters the story. The Tower has stripped away the false structure. The crown has fallen. The walls have collapsed. The old identity has been shattered.

And yet—we’re still here.

Perhaps for the first time, we are free to become something closer to our authentic self.

The Tower says: This is what you are not. The Star answers: Then let me show you what you are.

THE STAR AND THE HERMIT

Another way to understand The Star is to compare her with The Hermit, because in some respects they represent almost opposite energies.

Psychologically, The Hermit represents deliberate introversion. He steps away from the collective noise of society to enter the inner world alone. He is searching for something that cannot be found amid the chatter and expectations of everyone around him.

Visually, his heavy gray cloak creates a boundary between himself and the world. He stands alone on his snowy mountain peak, carrying only his staff and lantern. The lantern represents consciousness illuminating the darkness—the small light with which he explores the unknown territories within himself.

The Hermit isn’t simply alone.

He wants to be alone.

He isn’t trying to share something. He’s trying to find something.

The Star is different.

She has emerged from that inward journey. She stands naked beneath the stars, without armor, cloak, crown, fortress, or disguise. There is nothing separating her from the world around her.

She isn’t searching for another source of energy. She has become a source.

She pours her water—her energy, creativity, compassion, wisdom, and essential self—back into the world.

Some goes into the pool, the realm of emotion and the unconscious. Some goes onto the earth, nourishing ordinary life.

She isn’t hiding. She’s nourishing. And perhaps most importantly, she isn’t diminished by giving. Her vessels don’t seem to run dry.

That is one of the profound lessons of The Star: when what we give comes from the authentic self rather than from obligation, fear, or the desperate need for approval, sharing ourselves does not necessarily empty us.

Sometimes it makes us more fully ourselves.

The Star Poster – 13 X 19 Inches – Available on Etsy

THE GUIDING STAR

Jung used the ancient term psychopomp for an archetypal figure that mediates between different realms of experience—particularly between consciousness and the unconscious. The psychopomp is a guide who leads us from one realm into the next.

The Star can be understood as such a guide. She is leading us from the destruction of The Tower into our own light.

But whatever psychological language we use, the message of The Star is remarkably simple.

We are meant to shine.

We are supposed to shine.

And for many people, that is much more difficult than it sounds.

Psychologist Brené Brown has described shame as the intensely painful experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.

That belief can become one of the most powerful forces keeping us from fully participating in our own lives. We don’t show people what we’ve created because perhaps it isn’t good enough.

We don’t speak because perhaps what we have to say isn’t important.

We don’t pursue the thing we desperately want because perhaps we aren’t talented enough, attractive enough, intelligent enough, young enough, educated enough—or simply enough.

So we hide.

We become smaller. We cover ourselves in the Hermit’s cloak long after the period of solitude has served its purpose.

The Star has moved beyond that shame.

Look at her. She is completely exposed beneath an enormous night sky, yet there is nothing defensive about her.

She isn’t comparing herself with the other stars. She isn’t wondering whether Sirius is brighter. She isn’t asking whether someone else deserves to shine more than she does.

She simply shines.

And by doing so, she becomes a guide for everyone still standing in the darkness.

She seems to be saying: This is how you do it.

This is how you shine.

WHEN THE STAR SHOWS UP IN YOUR READING

When The Star appears in a reading, it often signals healing, renewal, authenticity, and the return of hope after a difficult period.

But I think its message goes considerably deeper than simply, “Things are going to get better.”

The Star asks you to stop hiding.

If you’ve recently experienced your own Tower—a loss, upheaval, disappointment, failure, or profound change—The Star suggests that the destruction may have cleared away something that was preventing you from becoming more completely yourself.

The question now is not simply: How do I get my old life back?

The better question may be: Who am I now that the old life is gone?

The Star can also appear when you have something that needs to be shared.

An idea. A talent. A piece of art. A book. A truth. A kindness.

A way of seeing the world that belongs uniquely to you.

You may still hear the old voice whispering that nobody wants it, that somebody else could do it better, or that you have no business putting yourself forward.

The Star says otherwise.

She doesn’t promise applause. She doesn’t promise success. She doesn’t even promise that everyone will understand what you have to offer.

She simply reminds you that your light cannot illuminate anything while you are hiding it.

So when The Star appears, ask yourself:

Where am I still making myself smaller than I need to be?

What part of myself am I finally ready to reveal?

What do I have that could nourish someone else?

And perhaps the most important question of all:

What would happen if I simply gave myself permission to shine?

Because what does a star do?

It shines.

The Tower Card – Anatomy of a Nervous Breakdown

Exploring the healing side of The Tower card through a Jungian perspective.

As Above, So Below.

As Within, So Without.

— The Kybalion

Most discussions of The Tower card in the Tarot focus almost entirely on what is happening in a person’s outer world.

And that’s understandable. It’s a dramatic card.

When The Tower appears, we think of events like divorce, losing a job, bankruptcy, foreclosure, the collapse of a relationship, or some other sudden upheaval. The outer destruction can be breathtaking.

But as the old Hermetic principle suggests, whatever is happening in our outer lives is also reflected in our inner lives.

When the structure of our exterior world collapses, something often collapses inside us as well.

That inner destruction is what we used to call a nervous breakdown.

Everything we believed to be true is suddenly called into question. Relationships with people we trusted crumble into dust. Beliefs we held dear for most of our lives are revealed to be false. The future we thought we understood disappears.

We find ourselves psychologically adrift. We have lost our place in the world, and we cannot seem to figure out how to get back to normal.

In Jungian terms, The Tower can be understood as the sudden and sometimes catastrophic dismantling of a rigid psychological structure. An outgrown persona, a false framework, or a collection of deeply held illusions can no longer withstand reality.

Something has to give.

And the symbols contained in The Tower provide a remarkably clear roadmap of that process.

THE CROWN

At the top of the tower is a crown, blasted away by the lightning strike.

Psychologically, the crown can represent the sovereignty of the conscious ego—the part of us that believes it understands what is happening and has things under control.

To put that more plainly, we all have to believe in ourselves.

When we get up in the morning, we need to believe that we are sane, that the world is reasonably predictable, and that what we do during the day will make sense and help keep us safe.

That is the everyday ego.

It goes to work. It pays the bills. It buys the groceries. It makes appointments. It solves problems. It deals with all those other human beings who are out there trying to do exactly the same thing.

Most of the time, it does a pretty good job.

But what happens when our predictable, manageable world completely falls apart?

What happens when we discover that our partner has been cheating on us? What happens when we lose the job we thought was secure? What happens when our finances collapse, our health fails, or something else occurs that simply cannot be fitted into the story we have been telling ourselves?

That wonderful daily wizard—the ego—suddenly doesn’t look so powerful.

The part of us that we believed would always keep us safe, solve the problem, and keep the car between the white lines suddenly has no idea what to do.

There is an old expression heard in twelve-step programs:

“My best thinking got me here.”

That is the crown being blown off the tower.

The Tower Poster – 13 X 19 Inches – Available on etsy

THE LIGHTNING STRIKE

And the moment we finally realize that we have really and truly lost control can feel like being struck by lightning.

It comes as a sudden flash of recognition—a crisis of the mind.

We may have spent months or even years denying that anything was seriously wrong.

“No,” we tell ourselves, “my partner couldn’t possibly be cheating on me. Those secretive phone calls and motel receipts don’t necessarily mean anything.”

Or perhaps we keep telling ourselves that we are just a little short financially this month.

Yes, we were short last month too. And the month before that. But things will turn around. We just need to tighten the budget a little more.

Until suddenly the truth becomes impossible to avoid.

We realize that we have been lying to ourselves.

And we are in real trouble.

That is the lightning strike.

The illusion doesn’t gradually fade away. For one terrible instant, we see through it.

And once we have seen the truth, we cannot completely unsee it.

THE FALLING FIGURES

The two figures blasted from the tower can represent the parts of ourselves that can no longer remain protected inside the old psychological structure.

We cannot hide in our intellectualizations and rationalizations anymore.

We built this magnificent structure called “my life.”

It protected us. It gave us an identity. It told us who we were, what mattered, whom we could trust, and what tomorrow was supposed to look like.

Now we have been thrown out of that safe little nest.

We are in psychological free fall.

There is nothing to hold on to because the things we once held on to are precisely the things that are collapsing.

But there is another way to look at those falling figures.

They are being grounded.

Literally.

They are falling out of an artificial structure and back toward the earth.

Toward reality.

The experience may hurt like hell. It may scare us half to death. But if we survive the fall, we have something we did not have while we were safely locked inside the tower:

The possibility of starting over.

Because now we have to.

THE GOLDEN SPARKS

Look carefully at the Waite-Smith Tower and something else is falling alongside the two figures.

Twenty-two golden drops or sparks surround the tower.

There are several ways of interpreting them. From a Jungian perspective, we might see them as psychic energy released when an old structure breaks apart. Spiritually, they can suggest something even more intriguing: illumination arriving in the middle of catastrophe.

The card is not simply about destruction.

It is about the destruction of a structure that can no longer contain who we are becoming.

At the very moment our old world is falling apart, new possibilities are appearing.

That doesn’t make the destruction pleasant.

It doesn’t mean we should pretend that loss isn’t loss, or pain isn’t pain.

But it suggests that destruction and creation may sometimes be two parts of the same process.

We cannot discover who we really are while clinging desperately to an identity built from fear, illusion, habit, or other people’s expectations.

The curse of The Tower is that everything we believed in may be falling apart.

The blessing is that we are finally free to discover what remains when it does.

And from there, we can begin again.

INDIVIDUATION

Perhaps the greatest difficulty with The Tower is that it feels like an ending.

Our world has been blown apart.

But psychologically, the ending may only be one stage in the process Carl Jung called individuation—the lifelong process of becoming a more whole and authentic individual.

As I said at the beginning, we all need a coherent story about ourselves in order to function.

But when that story becomes increasingly dependent upon denial, rationalization, self-deception, or an identity we have outgrown, maintaining it requires more and more energy.

Eventually reality catches up with us.

Eventually the false edifice comes tumbling down.

Jung used another wonderfully complicated word that is particularly appropriate to The Tower: enantiodromia.

Put very simply, it describes the tendency of something pushed too far in one direction to produce movement toward its opposite.

Psychologically, what we refuse to acknowledge does not simply disappear. The more rigidly we cling to one side of ourselves or one version of reality, the more pressure can accumulate in what has been excluded.

Eventually something breaks through.

In the language of Tarot, lightning strikes the tower.

When we become stuck in our own falsehoods—in the stories we tell ourselves and sometimes everyone around us—life has an uncomfortable way of getting us unstuck.

One way or another.

The false structure is burned down to its foundations so that something more authentic can eventually be built in its place.

And that may be the most important thing to understand about The Tower.

We naturally stare at the lightning.

We stare at the flames.

We stare at the people falling through the darkness.

But the destruction is not the entire story.

The Tower is also the clearing of ground.

Something false has ended.

Something real can now begin.

Yes, the burning tower is what catches our attention. But the deeper message of The Tower may be the healing that becomes possible after the destruction.