WIP: 21 – The World
The World is the final card of the Major Arcana and represents the culmination of the Tarot journey. In a personal sense, it is also the final synthesis of the ideas and forces I have been exploring throughout the creation of this deck. That gives the card considerable weight and importance. Yet that gravity is oddly contrasted by the simplicity of the imagery traditionally associated with it.
Historically, the card shows a dancer enclosed within a laurel wreath, surrounded by four figures that are usually interpreted as astrological symbols. They also represent the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—and by extension the four suits of the Tarot.
For a card meant to represent completion and wholeness, that imagery has always struck me as somewhat underwhelming. It feels symbolic rather than experiential, and it does not particularly excite me as an artist.
When I think about the word world, I find myself drawn less to the traditional imagery and more to the meaning of the word itself—and how that meaning has changed over time.
When the Tarot first appeared in early modern Europe, the world was understood primarily through human experience and geography. Today our perspective is radically different. We have seen our planet from space. We know that Earth is one small body orbiting an ordinary star in a vast galaxy, and that countless other worlds likely exist beyond it.
At the same time, our relationship with our own planet has become increasingly complex. We have explored and transformed it, but we have also damaged its ecosystems and altered its climate. The world is both our home and something fragile—something whose future depends on our choices.
These ideas leave me uncertain about how best to approach this card, but they all revolve around the same question: what do we mean by “the world”?
Is it the familiar realm of daily life—the known world in which we move and act?
Is it the planet itself, one world among millions in the cosmos?
Or does the concept extend even further, suggesting the universe as a whole?
One could argue that the card might more accurately be called The Universe. Yet that title risks turning the idea into something so vast and abstract that it loses the human meaning the Tarot is meant to illuminate.
For now, I find myself returning to the tension between these perspectives: the world as our immediate lived reality, and the world as a small but precious part of an unimaginably larger cosmos. Somewhere between those two ideas lies the direction this card will ultimately take.
For that reason I have been thinking about this card less in terms of traditional symbolism and more in terms of perspective. If The World represents completion, it must somehow reconcile the human scale of our lives with the much larger context in which those lives unfold. The challenge is finding imagery that conveys wholeness without collapsing into cliché. I am less interested in depicting a triumphal ending than in suggesting a moment of balance—when the individual life, the natural world, and the larger universe feel briefly aligned. What that image should look like is still very much an open question.