For You to See Life - 4u2c.life

The Judgement ~ symbolic meanings painted in the card.

The card of Judgement portrays a young man with curling black hair, dressedI m a white tunic and a blood-red travelling cloak. On his head is a winged helmet, and his feet are shod in winged sandals. In his right hand he holds the caduceus, the staff of magic entwined with two snakes. On either side of him, dimly visible, are two columns, one black and one white. The stairs on which he stands ascend to a doorway through which can be glimpsed a rich green landscape over which the sun is just rising. Before him, several carved coffins lie, and from these sarcophagi the dead are rising, reaching out to him as they shrug off their burial shrouds.

The black and white pillars once again reflect the ambivalence of the unconscious with its destructive and creative potentials.

The dead are mummified because the experiences of the past remain unremem- bered and unchanged in the unconscious, until their meaning suddenly becomes clear.

We can now understand the two snakes entwined around Hermes’ staff of magic as emblems of the feminine underworld of the instincts, which Apollo the sun-god conquers but which Herme- relates to in a different way, using it to serve his greater purposes in the design of the journey of life.

Major Arcana ~ The Judgement

Here, as we approach the end of the cycle of the Major Arcana, we meet that god whom we encountered at the beginning - Hermes the Psychopomp, Guide of Souls.

In the card of the Magician, Hermes appears as the Fool’s inner guide at the beginning of the journey of life - a trickster, a protector of lost travellers, and a magus who can point the way through the uncanny intuitions which in myth the god was said to dispense. Now he is revealed as a powerful underworld deity, emissary of Hades, who summons the dying gently and eloquently by laying his golden staff upon their eyes.

But Hermes could also summon the souls of the dead back to life, as well as ushering them into Hades’ realm. In myth, when Tantalos, the king of Lydia, cut his own son in pieces and served them as a feast for the gods, Hermes reassembled the pieces and restored the young man to life. As herald of the heavenly gods, Hermes also freed heroes such as Theseus who had entered Hades’ realm illicitly and then got stuck there. He also guided Orpheus into the dark kingdom to seek his lost wife Eurydice, and guided him out again when he had lost her for a second time. Thus Hermes of the card of Judgement is not only Hermes the Guide, but Hermes the Summoner, who leads the souls of the dead to their accounting and prepares them for renewed life.

On an inner level, Hermes the Psychopomp is an image of a process which occurs at certain critical moments in life: a summing-up, when the experiences of the past are gathered together and seen as part of an intelligent pattern, and the consequences of these experiences must be understood and accepted.

This process of summing-up is not an intellectual function, but rather a kind of cooking that occurs in the underworld of the unconscious. It is a call for the dead to rise - for the many and varied actions and decisions we perform to knit together and yield a harvest. The artist experiences this process when, after many hours or weeks or even years of attempting to formulate, research, practise technique and give shape to an elusive idea or image, something at last ‘happens’ and a new creative work is bom. This same process can be seen in psychotherapy, where an individual can struggle for many months with the disconnected memories and feelings of the past and present, stuck and blocked, and suddenly a kind of cohesion occurs and one’s life pattern makes sense at last.

This process can occur in any realm of life where we tunnel blind as moles, pouring effort into something which somehow remains elusive, and at last the effort is rewarded and there is a synthesis and a new development at hand. This is Hermes at his most magical, revealed at last as the true lord of the entirety of the Fool’s journey, knitting together through some myste- rious process of the intuition the experiences and insights gained from each stage of the journey, and magically blending these to form the beginnings of a new and larger personality.

Thus the figure of Hermes leading the dead souls to judgement embodies a process of birth. It is the birth of a more complete personality, which arises in a nonrational way from the combined experiences of the past, fused by insight and the sense that apparently random events and choices are really secretly connected. The judge of the dead decides what future has been earned from past efforts, and it is on the efforts of the past cards that the Fool’s future is built. The card of Judgement symbolizes the rewards for efforts made, although the judge is inside us, not outside in the world. We pay also for our sins of unconsciousness, and reap the harvest of refusing to take up responsibility for our own choices at each stage of the journey.

Judgement is an image not just of a new beginning, but a beginning which emerges out of the past. In Eastern philosophy, this is called karma. Each person sows seed in his own field, and ultimately must reap the harvest which springs from his own sowing. Although Hermes is often portrayed as a cheat and a liar, here, as Psychopomp, he does not permit the soul to lie. Everything must be accounted for, and the Fool meets at last the consequences of all his choices in life.

On a divinatory level, the card of Judgement, when it appears in a spread, augurs a time when the rewards of past efforts appear. This is period of summing-up, of a realization of what we have been doing and where we ourselves have created the future which now awaits us. It is an ambiguous card, for it can also imply a disturbing confrontation with all our own evasions and self-betrayals. The reward is not always a pleasant one. The Fool must now answer for his journey, for the time of harvest has arrived, and the mistakes and creative efforts of the past are gathered together to form the future. Whatever occurs to the individual in terms of experiences, the card of Judgement heralds the end of a chapter in life. But unlike the card of Death, it does not imply mourning. Rather, it is a clear perception of the extent to which we have been able to be true to ourselves.

I will explain in my readings what each card means, this is a general interpritation taken from the Mythic Tarot Deck

Information Source: Mythic Tarot Deck
[published in 1986 by Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene and Illustrated by Tricia Newell (not the New Mythic Tarot)]