The World.
The circle closed and tied at both ends.
Upright, then reversed, as Waite gave them in 1910.
A figure wound in a purple scarf steps inside a closed laurel wreath, tied top and bottom with red. A wand in each hand, held level. An angel, an eagle, a bull and a lion in the four corners.
Completion, fastened at both ends. The wreath is tied shut, the arms are down, and the four in the corners are the four that surrounded the Wheel. You are at the end of the same circle you started in, and the four things watching it have not moved.
Four things people go to on this card
- the wreath
You went to the wreath. Green laurel, closed into an oval, tied top and bottom with red.
A thing that has been closed rather than stopped. A circle, with the ends brought round and fastened, and the fastenings drawn where you can see them.
The completion in this card is structural, and it took a long time. Something in your life has come all the way round to where it began, and nobody has marked it, because finishing is quieter than starting and there is no ceremony for it. Mark it yourself. A closed circle that nobody names stays open.
What has come all the way round, and have you marked that it is finished?
- her hands
You picked her hands over the wreath. A wand in each, the same size, held level.
Capability held in balance rather than in use. The Magician had one of these and was pointing with it; she has two and is doing nothing with either, and the arms are down at her sides.
That is what the end of a cycle looks like when it has gone well. The tools are in hand, nothing urgently needs doing with them, and the quiet is not a gap. There is something you could do at the moment that nothing is requiring you to do. That is the position, and it does not last.
What could you do at the moment that nothing urgently requires you to do?
- the four corners
You went back to the corners. An angel, an eagle, a bull and a lion, the same four as on the Wheel.
These two cards share their corners, and that is the argument of the whole sequence. The same fixed four surrounded a spinning mechanism eleven cards ago; here they surround somebody standing still inside a closed circle.
On the Wheel they had their heads in books. Here they are simply present, and nothing is being studied, because there is nothing left to work out. Whatever you have finished was finished inside the same conditions you began in. They did not improve to let you through. You got better at them.
What has stayed constant from the beginning of this to the end of it?
- the scarf
The cloth is what you noticed. A purple scarf wound round her, and it is the only thing she has on.
This is nearly the Fool again. A figure mid-step with almost nothing on, and the difference is that there is a wreath around this one and there was a cliff under that one.
So the last card of the sequence is the first card of it, dressed slightly differently and inside a closed circle, which is either the point of the whole deck or the joke at the end of it. Either way you are about to step off again, with about as much in your hands as last time.
If this is the end of one circle and the start of another, what is the first step of the next one?
On the Tree of Life, The World is the thirty-second path, Tau, from Yesod to Malkuth, in the Golden Dawn's attribution (Liber 777).
Draw a card, and if this one turns, press whichever of these four you went to and the reading is written from there instead. Pulled it in a spread of your own? Read the whole spread here.