Judgement
Trump XX of the tarot: an angel sounding a trumpet as the dead rise. A. E. Waite read it as change of position and renewal.
Meaning
The card shows an angel blowing a trumpet with a banner bearing a cross, while the dead rise from their tombs. Waite called its design "essentially invariable in all Tarot sets", and in his own deck added more rising figures than the usual man, woman and child.
What does the Judgement card mean?
Waite's meanings are "change of position, renewal, outcome", with another account specifying "total loss though lawsuit"; reversed, "weakness, pusillanimity, simplicity; also deliberation, decision, sentence".
In older decks
Il Giudizio is the title in a nineteenth-century Milanese pack in the British Museum, and Papus joined the card to the twentieth Hebrew letter, Resh.
Read next
- Next in Tarot cardsThe WorldThe last trump of the tarot, numbered XXI: a dancing woman inside an oval garland. A. E. Waite read it as assured success.
- The same shape in Chinese radicalsMù 目The character for ‘eye’, and radical 109 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for looking and seeing are filed.
See also
Temperance, The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor.
Sources
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A. E. Waite, William Rider & Son, London, 1910 (the sacred-texts.com transcription, on the Internet Archive), The Trumps Major; The Greater Arcana and their Divinatory Meanings
- The Tarot of the Bohemians, by Papus, Chapman & Hall, London, 1896, translated by A. P. Morton (scan on the Internet Archive), The Symbolical Tarot
- A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and Other Cards in the British Museum, by W. H. Willshire, Trustees of the British Museum, London, 1876 (scan on the Internet Archive), Italian tarots, second quarter of the nineteenth century, Milan
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from letters and numbers, lines or squares and rectangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 30, 2026. How we research
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