MAJOR ARCANA · TRUMP XXI
The World
Tarot card meaning
UPRIGHT
Completion, integration, achievement, wholeness.
REVERSED
Unfinished business, lack of closure, shortcuts.
The card
A dancing figure holding two wands floats inside an oval wreath; the four winged creatures (man, eagle, lion, bull) watch from the corners.
The World is trump XXI of the twenty-two trumps of the Major Arcana.
In the Golden Dawn's attributions it carries the Hebrew letter Tav (ת), “cross, mark”, and the planet Saturn and the element of Earth. On the Tree of Life it is path 32, joining Yesod and Malkuth.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: The Universe, XXI.
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 Assured success, recompense, voyage, route, emigration, flight, change of place.
REVERSED Inertia, fixity, stagnation, permanence.
The picture and its symbolism
As this final message of the Major Trumps is unchanged—and indeed unchangeable—in respect of its design, it has been partly described already regarding its deeper sense. It represents also the perfection and end of the Cosmos, the secret which is within it, the rapture of the universe when it understands itself in God. It is further the state of the soul in the consciousness of Divine Vision, reflected from the self-knowing spirit. But these meanings are without prejudice to that which I have said concerning it on the material side.
It has more than one message on the macrocosmic side and is, for example, the state of the restored world when the law of manifestation shall have been carried to the highest degree of natural perfection. But it is perhaps more especially a story of the past, referring to that day when all was declared to be good, when the morning stars sang
together and all the Sons of God shouted for joy. One of the worst explanations concerning it is that the figure symbolizes the Magus when he has reached the highest degree of initiation; another account says that it represents the absolute, which is ridiculous. The figure has been said to stand for Truth, which is, however, more properly allocated to the seventeenth card. Lastly, it has been called the Crown of the Magi.
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
The numbered cards it governs
Five of Wands: a decan ruled by Saturn · Ten of Wands: a decan ruled by Saturn · Eight of Cups: a decan ruled by Saturn · Three of Swords: a decan ruled by Saturn · Seven of Pentacles: a decan ruled by Saturn · Ace of Pentacles: the root of Earth
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 Monde, XXI.
Learn more in the lessons
- The Structure of the Tarot · 14 min · free
- The Major Arcana Journey · 18 min
- The Thoth Tarot · 12 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.