The World

The image

Smith's World shows a woman, naked except for a long violet scarf wound around her body, dancing or floating in mid-air. In each hand she holds a slender wand. She is enclosed by a large oval wreath of green leaves, bound at top and bottom with red ribbons tied in the shape of the infinity sign. In the four corners, on clouds, appear the heads of a man or angel and an eagle above, and of a bull and a lion below. The background is pale blue.

History

The World was the highest trump in most Italian orderings. Fifteenth-century cards show two putti holding a globe with a city or landscape inside it, an image of the earthly or heavenly world. The Tarot de Marseille's Le Monde has a nude figure with a staff inside an oval wreath, with the four creatures at the corners — an arrangement borrowed from Christian images of Christ in Majesty surrounded by the symbols of the four evangelists.

The Golden Dawn attributed the card to Saturn and to the Hebrew letter Tav, the last letter of the alphabet, and also to the element of Earth. Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) describes the card as the perfection and end of the cosmos and the rapture of the universe when it understands itself in God. Aleister Crowley called it the Universe in the Thoth deck.

Symbolism

The four creatures, also seen on the Wheel of Fortune, stand for the four fixed signs of the zodiac — Aquarius, Scorpio (as the eagle), Taurus and Leo — and for the four elements; here, unlike on the Wheel, they no longer need books, which readers take as learning completed. The wreath is the boundary of the world and also a doorway; its oval shape has been compared to a womb, suggesting that completion is also a birth. The two wands recall the single wand of the Magician, as though the dancer now holds both poles of power in balance.

Twenty-one is three times seven, both numbers of completeness, and reduces to three, the number of the Empress. Saturn, outermost of the traditional planets, rules time, form and limits, so the card represents the cosmos taking final shape. Tav means "mark" or "cross". Its path is the last on the Tree of Life, joining Yesod to Malkuth, the material world — and therefore the first path for anyone beginning the ascent.

In a reading

The World is read as a strong, positive conclusion. With the Ten of Pentacles it suggests lasting security; with the Eight of Cups, the end of a chapter freely chosen; with the Fool, the completion of one journey and the start of the next. Readers often treat it as a sign to take stock before beginning again.