
MAJOR ARCANA · TRUMP XX
Judgement
Tarot card meaning
UPRIGHT
Awakening, reckoning, a calling, rebirth.
REVERSED
Self-doubt, refusing the call, harsh self-judgement.
The card
An angel blows a trumpet from the clouds; men, women and children rise from coffins with arms outstretched.
Judgement is trump XX of the twenty-two trumps of the Major Arcana.
In the Golden Dawn's attributions it carries the Hebrew letter Shin (ש), “tooth”, and the elements of Fire and Spirit. On the Tree of Life it is path 31, joining Hod and Malkuth.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: The Aeon, XX.
In Waite's words
Arthur Edward Waite designed the deck that Pamela Colman Smith drew, and explained it in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911). His text, with his spelling:
DIVINATORY MEANINGS Change of position, renewal, outcome. Another account specifies total loss though lawsuit.
REVERSED Weakness, pusillanimity, simplicity; also deliberation, decision, sentence.
The picture and its symbolism
I have said that this symbol is essentially invariable in all Tarot sets, or at least the variations do not alter its character. The great angel is here encompassed by clouds, but he blows his bannered trumpet, and the cross as usual is displayed on the banner. The dead are rising from their tombs—a woman on the right, a man on the left hand, and between them their child, whose back is turned. But in this card there are more than three who are restored, and it has been thought worth while to make this variation as illustrating the insufficiency of current explanations. It should be noted that all the figures are as one in the wonder, adoration and ecstacy expressed by their attitudes. It is the card which registers the accomplishment of the great work of transformation in answer to the summons of the Supernal—which summons is heard and answered from within.
Herein is the intimation of a significance which cannot well be carried further in the
present place. What is that within us which does sound a trumpet and all that is lower in our nature rises in response—almost in a moment, almost in the twinkling of an eye? Let the card continue to depict, for those who can see no further, the Last Judgment and the resurrection in the natural body; but let those who have inward eyes look and discover therewith. They will understand that it has been called truly in the past a card of eternal life, and for this reason it may be compared with that which passes under the name of Temperance.
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A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London: William Rider & Son, 1911), Part II § 2 and Part III § 3. Public domain; text from the 1922 printing on Wikisource.
Related cards
In three historical decks
The same card as it was painted in fifteenth-century Milan, printed in the French pattern of the Tarot de Marseille, and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for the Rider–Waite–Smith deck.



In the Tarot de Marseille: Le Jugement, XX.
Learn more in the lessons
- The Thoth Tarot · 12 min
- The Twenty-Two Paths & the Tarot · 18 min
- The Major Arcana Journey · 18 min
Images: Pamela Colman Smith, 1909 (public domain); the RWS1909 scans on Wikimedia Commons. Lequart, Paris, c. 1890 (public domain); scans from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica), via Wikimedia Commons. Attributed to Bonifacio Bembo, mid-15th century (public domain); scans by David Madore, via Wikimedia Commons.