For You to See Life - 4u2c.life

The World ~ symbolic meanings painted in the card.

The card of the World portrays a golden serpent coiled in the shape of an egg, eating its own tail. Within its circumference a strange figure dances, half male and half female winged crowned with laurel-leaves, and holding in each hand a golden staff. Around the egg-shape of the serpent can be seen, rising from the clouds, a cup, sword, a flaming wand and a golden pentacle.

The World Snake, called Ouroboros in Greek, was said to be itself both male and female, self-impregnating, self-feeding, immortal and complete.

Thus it is the mythic image for both God and nature, here embodied in one symbol.

The four symbols which preside over the realms of water, fire, air and earth reflea the potentials which await development in the new personality.

The golden staffs are connected with the magic wand of Hermes, for the reborn personality can create more potently in the realms of feeling, imagination, mind and matter.

Major Arcana ~ The World

Here we meet Hermaphroditus, who in myth was the child of Hermes and Aphrodite. In one version of the tale, Hermaphroditus was bom a double-sexed being. But in another version, this duality or unity was made, rather than bom.

Hermaphroditus was originally a male child, and to conceal his illict birth, Aphrodite immediately confided him to the nymphs of Mount Ida, who brought him up in the forests. At the age of fifteen he was a wild and savage youth whose chief pleasure was to hunt in the wooded mountains. One day he arrived at the banks of a limpid lake whose freshness tempted him to bathe. The nymph Salmacis who ruled the lake saw him and was enamoured of his beauty. She told him so, and in vain the shy youth attempted to repulse her.

Salmacis threw her arms around him and covered him with kisses. He continued to resist, and the nymph cried out, ‘O gods! grant that nothing may ever separate him from me, or me from him!’ Immediately their two bodies were united and became as one.

The four devices which surround the image of Hermaphroditus in the card of the World belong to the four deities: Aphrodite the love-goddess, Zeus the king of the gods, Athene the goddess of wisdom, and Poseidon the god of earthquakes. We have already encountered these symbols in the card of the Magician: the cup of love, the wand of creative imagination, the sword of the intellect, and the pentacle of physical reality. We will meet these four objects again when we explore the four Suits of the Minor Arcana. The serpent which surrounds Hermaphroditus is the ancient World Snake, which as we have seen embodies the raw instinctual power of life itself, forever devouring and recreating itself.

On an inner level, the image of Hermaphroditus is an image of the experience of being whole. Male and female are more than sexual identifications limited to the genital organs. They are great polarities which encompass all the opposites in life. The double-sexed being, born in one version of the myth and made in another, is a symbol of the potential integration of the opposites within the personality. In one sense Hermaphroditus is bom thus, because the potential for this integration is inherent in all of us. But in another sense, Hermaphrodi tus is made, because it is the varied experiences of the entire journey of the Major Arcana which lead ultimately to this complete being.

The qualities of maternal care and paternal ethics, intuition and physical expression, mind and feeling, relationship and solitude, conflict and harmony, spirit and body - all these opposites which war within us and create such struggle in our lives are in this card portrayed as joined, living in harmony within the great circle of the World Snake which is an image of inexhaustible life.

The image of wholeness as it is portrayed in the card of the World is an ideal goal, rather than something which we can completely possess. We are human and therefore imperfect, and the divine androgyne is beyond our reach. But we may glimpse this state whenever there is a sense of inner healing, where two warring parts of ourselves have at last come together and some inner resolution has brought peace. Ordinarily, when we encounter these opposites in life and in ourselves, we deny that such a conflict exists, repressing half of it and casting it into the underworld of the unconscious. Or we project the uncomfortable half on to another person, or something in the outside world, and expend our energy battling with something which is really within ourselves.

The state of ambivalence is part of the human condition; yet how many of us have the courage to admit our ambivalence? ‘Of course I want to get married!’ we say, or, ‘Of course I want a child!’ or ‘Of course I love you! or ‘Of course I believe in God!’ or ‘Of course I love my work!’ But as human beings we are complex, and the Fool’s journey is really a journey of discovery through the opposites of one’s being, conscious and unconscious together. The card of the World is the fmal card of the Major Arcana, and the end of the Fool’s journey.

Yet it is also an egg which implies the seed of a new' journey. Thus, whenever we feel we have ‘arrived’ and there is a moment of achievement and healing, a fresh challenge arises, a fresh discovery of the ancient spiralling journey. Thus we continue to grow and change, always moving toward Hermaphroditus, the image of wholeness, yet never achieving it save in a small and sometimes subtle way.

On a divinatory level, the card of the World when it appears in a spread augurs a time of achievement and integration. This is a period of triumph at the successful conclusion of a matter, or the reaching of a goal which has been worked hard for. But this peak is merely a glimpse of something mysterious and elusive, and the dancing Hermaphroditus becomes the foetus who eventually emerges from the cave as the Fool. Thus the great cycle of the Major Arcana ends where it begins, for we might start with Hermaphroditus as the unborn potential of the personality which ultimately leads to the birth of the Fool. And so the circle, like the World Snake, is complete.

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)]