The World (Tarot Triptych)
Name: The World
Number: XXI
Astrology: Saturn
Qabalah: Tau ת
Chris Gabriel May 11, 2024
The World card is a cosmogram, meaning it depicts the whole of the cosmos. We find a naked woman floating within a ring, her legs crossed and something flowing about her. She is Maya, the embodied force of creation and illusion. Her dancing and spinning manifests the material world. The Four Cherubs frame the corners as symbols of the states of matter. This card, while containing lofty spiritual imagery, pertains to mundane material reality.
In Marseilles, our lady has a wand and a red/green sash. She is smiling and looking down. In the corners sit a winged angel, an eagle, and a lion, each of them bearing a Nimbus. Only the Bull, the Cherub of Earth, is uncrowned. The ring is a blue wreath with yellow ties, set on a pure white background.
In Rider, she has two wands and a gray, saturnine sash. She has a Mona Lisa smile and is looking down. Here the Cherubs are emerging out of clouds and have no nimbus. The ring is vegetable green with red ties and the card is set on a blue sky.
In Thoth, we have a drastically different image. World gives way to the vast Universe and the lady is no longer human, but living gold. Her sash is a serpent, and she is dancing. The Cherubs appear almost as a fountain structure, pouring fourth energy. The ring is the perspective of a round sky, the wheel of the Zodiac, and the endless stars beyond. The card is set on a resurrected Saturn, no longer dead, but verdant. The eye of God is looking down at the motions within the ring, and below is the geometric emanation of these lofty elements.
How are we to make sense of this beautiful but complex imagery?
Let’s start with a sort of spiritual “math”. Just as our journey through the Major Arcana begins with airy Zero, here we find the empty hole of the number filled in by material reality. Potential becoming actualized.
0=2, as the magicians declare. Nothing is lonely, and in it’s loneliness begets difference. By dividing itself into what we call light and dark, good and evil, night and day, masculine and feminine, it creates the tension necessary for the theater of existence.
And of course it doesn’t stop there, two makes itself four, and on and on until we have our endlessly varied World.
The sash is the serpentine, spiraling energy of creation and the direction of this divine expansion flows along
The Cherubs are the four Living Creatures of Ezekiel, the four elements, and the four fixed signs of the Zodiac. They are the divided Tetragrammaton:
The Lion is Leo and Fire
The Eagle is Scorpio and Water
The Angel is Aquarius and Air
The Bull is Taurus and Earth
These four elements, as our study of tarot will make clear, make up reality itself. We can bring this to a more scientific view, as we often struggle with differentiating the Philosopher’s elements from mundane elements.
Water is not H20, but all liquids, Earth is not dirt, but all solids, etc. The philosophical elements are states of matter and their corresponding mystical significance.
In this way, this card provides a view of all physical reality.
When we draw this card, we are often reaching a standstill, a moment of pause to look at ourselves, our actions, and our world from the distance of the heavenly machinations that form it.
