The World (XXI)

The deck opens with a man at a table pulling light down through himself and closes with a figure in the air with the light all round. Waite calls the design of the last card unchanged and indeed unchangeable, then reads it twice, once from outside the wreath and once from inside.

From outside, in Part I, the wreath is ‘an elliptic garland, as if it were a chain of flowers intended to symbolize all sensible things’, and the picture is eloquent, he says, ‘of the swirl of the sensitive life, of joy attained in the body, of the soul's intoxication in the earthly paradise’. Lévi calls the same garland a crown and says the figure is Truth. From inside, in Part II, the card becomes ‘the perfection and end of the Cosmos, the secret which is within it, the rapture of the universe when it understands itself in God’. Both readings make the wreath the whole created world, seen as a garden or seen as a cosmos, with a dancer at the middle of it, which is why it is filed under the Heavens.

The four in the corners are Ezekiel's and the Apocalypse's, the man, the eagle, the lion and the bull, handed over in Christian use to the four Evangelists. On the Wheel of Fortune they sit reading. Here they only watch. Waite calls them the Divine Watchers and ties them to the four ineffable letters of the Holy Name, which he says the mystical beasts are sometimes given. Four letters, four creatures, four corners of the card and of the sky: the frame that held the tenth card holds the twenty first.

The lion sits at the lower right on its cloud, looking in. It is Mark's lion and it is Leo, and it has an entry of its own here because it turns up everywhere from Fludd's mirror of nature to the Strength card. On this card its whole job is to be one of four.

The dancer Waite describes as ‘a woman whom the wind has girt about the loins with a light scarf, and this is all her vesture; she is in the act of dancing, and has a wand in either hand’. Later readers have argued about the figure's sex and Pamela Colman Smith left it open. Waite did not. What she means he stacks in layers: ‘the state of the soul in the consciousness of Divine Vision, reflected from the self knowing spirit’; the restored world once manifestation has been carried to its highest natural degree; and most especially, he thinks, a story of the past, ‘that day when all was declared to be good, when the morning stars sang together and all the Sons of God shouted for joy’. The readings he dislikes he names and drops: the Magus at the highest degree of initiation, one of the worst; the absolute, ridiculous; Truth, which he says belongs to the Star. What is left is a dance at the end of everything, watched from the four corners of heaven by the same beasts who watched the wheel turn.