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
A nineteenth-century Milanese pack in the British Museum titles the card Il Giudizio. Papus joined it to the twentieth Hebrew letter, Resh.
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
Last reviewed September 27, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research