Justice Tarot Card Meaning and Art: Vivid Waite Smith Tarot Deck: Queen of Tarot

Justice Tarot Card Meaning and Art Vivid Waite Smith Tarot Deck

Designation

About the Deck

Vivid Waite Smith Tarot Deck

These cards are featured in my book, "A Concise Guide to the Tarot" by Loren Lundgren. I took the information for the meanings on these tarot cards from "The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Being Fragments of a Secret Tradition Under the Veil of Divination", by A. E. Waite, 1911, now in the public domain. I edited the tarot card descriptions and meanings for clarity and brevity, modernizing the text. I scanned in the original black and white illustrations of the cards drawn by Pamela Colman Smith, from the 1911 book. I digitally retouched and painted those illustrations in detailed color.

Provenance

Description

This figure sits between pillars, like the High Priestess. The pillars of Justice open into one world and the pillars of the High Priestess into another. The operation of spiritual justice is like the breathing of the Spirit where it wills, and we have no way to explain it. It is like the possession of the fairy gifts, high gifts, and the gracious gifts of the poet—we either have them or we don't, and their presence is as much a mystery as their absence.

Meaning of Justice from the Vivid Waite Smith Tarot Deck

Upright

Fairness, rightness, integrity, accomplishment; triumph of the deserving side in law.

Reversed

Law in all its forms, legal complications, bigotry, bias, excessive severity.

According to Many Schools of Thought

A. E. Waite's Secondary Meanings

Justice. That the Tarot, though it is of all reasonable antiquity, is not of time immemorial, is shewn by this card, which could have been presented in a much more archaic manner. Those, however, who have gifts of discernment in matters of this kind will not need to be told that age is in no sense of the essence of the consideration; the Rite of Closing the Lodge in the Third Craft Grade of Masonry may belong to the late eighteenth century, but the fact signifies nothing; it is still the summary of all the instituted and official Mysteries. The female figure of the eleventh card is said to be Astraea, who personified the same virtue and is represented by the same symbols. This goddess notwithstanding, and notwithstanding the vulgarian Cupid, the Tarot is not of Roman mythology, or of Greek either. Its presentation of justice is supposed to be one of the four cardinal virtues included in the sequence of Greater Arcana; but, as it so happens, the fourth emblem is wanting, and it became necessary for the commentators to discover it at all costs. They did what it was possible to do, and yet the laws of research have never succeeded in extricating the missing Persephone under the form of Prudence. Court de Gebelin attempted to solve the difficulty by a tour de force, and believed that he had extracted what he wanted from the symbol of the Hanged Man--wherein he deceived himself. The Tarot has, therefore, its justice, its Temperance also and its Fortitude, but--owing to a curious omission--it does not offer us any type of Prudence, though it may be admitted that, in some respects, the isolation of the Hermit, pursuing a solitary path by the light of his own lamp, gives, to those who can receive it, a certain high counsel in respect of the via prudentiae.