Judgement: trumpet and the risen

Trumpet, banner, coffins: an angel sounds the horn and those below rise

Waite says this symbol is essentially invariable in all Tarot sets. The great angel is encompassed by clouds, but he blows his bannered trumpet, and the cross as usual is displayed on the banner. The dead are rising from their tombs: a woman on the right, a man on the left hand, and between them their child, whose back is turned.

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Judgement as BaZiFlow drew it: trumpet and the risen.

But in this card more than three are restored, a variation he thought worth making as illustrating the insufficiency of current explanations. He adds that all the figures are as one in the wonder, adoration and ecstasy expressed by their attitudes.

In the Rider-Waite-Smith original: XX at the top; the angel has curly golden hair and red-edged wings, and blows a golden trumpet hung with a white banner bearing a red cross; clouds gather around him; below on the water float several grey rectangular coffins, and bare grey figures raise their arms, a man at the left, a long-haired woman at the right, a child in the middle with its back turned, and a few more raising their arms in the distance; snowy peaks behind.

The list: change of position, renewal, outcome, and another account of lawsuit

Waite’s divinatory meanings are: change of position, renewal, outcome. Then he brings in another account, which specifies total loss through lawsuit. The three main words all point to a state after change; the other account points the opposite way.

Change of position, renewal, outcome. Another account specifies total loss though lawsuit.

Trumpet, risen, inner call: Waite reads a transformation

In the second half of Part II, Waite moves the picture from outside to inside. He says the card registers the accomplishment of the great work of transformation in answer to the summons of the Supernal, and that this summons is heard and answered from within.

His question is the plainest sentence in the passage:

What is that within us which does sound a trumpet and all that is lower in our nature rises in response, almost in a moment?

Then he leaves room for two ways of seeing it: for those who can see no further, the card continues to depict the Last Judgment and the resurrection in the natural body, and those who have inward eyes may discover more. He adds that it has truly been called in the past a card of eternal life, and so may be compared with Temperance.

How to read it: changing a travel route, first find which call sounded

Take the shape of “one call, several figures rise” and apply it to one concrete matter. Four people planned a week along the coast, and one of them proposes switching to a mountain route from the third day.

1. 1

   Find the call

   Write in one sentence what set off the change, and mark whether it came from outside (a weather forecast, a companion’s proposal) or from a thought of your own. Waite asks what within us sounds the trumpet.

2. 2

   Count who rises in answer

   Go through the booked rooms, the tickets and your companions’ leave one by one, marking each “moved” or “not moved at all”. More than one rises, but not everything does.

3. 3

   Write the new position

   After the change, where are you on the morning of day three, and which bookings must be cancelled or remade? This matches “change of position” in the list.

Reversed and neighboring cards: weakness, pusillanimity, simplicity, and “deliberation, decision, sentence”

Waite’s reversed line is: weakness, pusillanimity, simplicity; also deliberation, decision, sentence. The first half describes a person’s condition and the second half the steps of handling a matter, two kinds of words side by side in one line.

Weakness, pusillanimity, simplicity; also deliberation, decision, sentence.