The Star
Trump XVII of the tarot: a woman pouring water beneath a great star. A. E. Waite noted it is usually read as a card of hope.
Meaning
Waite describes "a great, radiant star of eight rays, surrounded by seven lesser stars", and beneath it a naked woman, one knee on the land and one foot on the water, pouring water from two ewers, with a bird on a tree behind her. He also recorded its older names: the Dog-Star, Sirius and the Star of the Magi.
What does the Star card mean?
Waite's own list is mixed: "loss, theft, privation, abandonment", while, by another reading, "hope and bright prospects"; reversed, "arrogance, haughtiness, impotence". He wrote that the summary of several explanations says "it is a card of hope".
In older decks
A nineteenth-century Milanese pack in the British Museum titles the card Le Stelle, the stars. Papus, who also called it the Stars, joined it to the seventeenth Hebrew letter, Pe.
Read next
- Next in Tarot cardsThe MoonTrump XVIII of the tarot: the moon above two towers, with a dog and a wolf howling and a crayfish crawling from the water. A. E. Waite read it as hidden enemies and deception.
- The same shape in Historical flagsBennington flagA flag of thirteen stripes, white at the top and bottom, with “76” under an arch of stars in the blue canton, long said to have flown at the Battle of Bennington in 1777. The Bennington Museum, which owns it, dates it to between 1812 and 1830, because it is made entirely of cotton.
See also
The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant.
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, squares and rectangles or stars.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 30, 2026. How we research
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