Tarot card meanings · Major Arcana 21
What does The World mean in tarot?
In A. E. Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), the World upright means “Assured success, recompense, voyage, route, emigration, flight, change of place”, and reversed “Inertia, fixity, stagnation, permanence”.
Upright
Assured success, recompense, voyage, route, emigration, flight, change of place.Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Part 3
Reversed
Inertia, fixity, stagnation, permanence.Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Part 3
What does the picture show?
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.Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Part 2
Where does the World fall in a reading?
The World belongs to the Major Arcana. On this site you draw three cards, which take three of the places in the ten-card method Waite describes: “This covers him”, “This crosses him”, “This is before him”. The same card reads differently in each place, and the I Ching cast beside it may agree or disagree.
Ask one question. Draw three cards, and cast an I Ching hexagram beside them to see where East and West agree. Free.
Draw three cardsWaite's words are quoted as printed, and left out where they speak of money, law, illness or disaster. The pictures are the 1909 deck drawn by Pamela Colman Smith. For entertainment and self-reflection.