Judgement (XX)

Waite says this card cannot be changed, and then changes it. The symbol is essentially invariable in all Tarot sets, he writes, or at least the variations do not alter its character. Then he adds people to it. The older design raises three from the graves; this one raises more, and his reason is really about his rivals: ‘in this card there are more than three who are restored, and it has been thought worth while to make this variation as illustrating the insufficiency of current explanations’.

The angel takes the top of the card. Gabriel by tradition, though Waite never names him, huge in the clouds with red wings and his cheeks full on the trumpet, and the banner hanging from the trumpet is white with the plain red cross of the resurrection. Below him grey figures stand out of coffins floating on a sea, arms lifted, faces turned up: a woman on the right, a man on the left, and between them a child with its back to the reader. Behind that family the lids are open all the way to the mountains. Waite notes that every one of them is as one in the wonder, adoration and ecstasy of their attitudes. Nobody is being judged. Everybody is astonished.

Then he turns the scene inwards, and asks the best question he put to any card in the deck. The summons is heard and answered from within, he says: ‘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, almost in the twinkling of an eye?’ The last phrase is Paul's, out of the chapter on the resurrection of the dead, and Waite has taken it to describe something that happens to somebody who is still alive.

He leaves both readings standing and lets the reader pick a floor. Let the card go on showing the Last Judgment and the resurrection of the body to those who can see no further, he says, and let those with inward eyes look and find the rest. Of every card in the deck, this is the one whose picture he refused to touch and whose meaning he rewrote entirely.