The World
The last trump of the tarot, numbered XXI: a dancing woman inside an oval garland. A. E. Waite read it as assured success.
Meaning
Waite describes a woman, dancing with a wand in either hand, inside an elliptic garland, with the four living creatures of the Apocalypse and Ezekiel's vision at the corners. Other names for the card were the Universe and Time.
Waite's meanings
Waite gave the World "assured success, recompense, voyage, route, emigration, flight, change of place"; reversed, "inertia, fixity, stagnation, permanence".
In older decks
A nineteenth-century Milanese pack in the British Museum titles the card Il Mondo. Papus numbered it 22 and joined it to the last Hebrew letter, Tau. Waite took care to number it 21, and left the Hebrew letters out, partly because "nearly every attribution is wrong". In Giuseppe Maria Mitelli's Bolognese tarocchino, of which the British Museum has three sets, the World is Atlas.
Four creatures or four seasons
Waite saw in the corners the four living creatures of the Apocalypse and Ezekiel's vision, "attributed to the evangelists in Christian symbolism". Court de Gébelin, who took the tarot for an Egyptian book, read the card as Time: a goddess moving within a circle of the year's revolutions, with the four seasons at the corners, the eagle for spring, the lion for summer, the ox for autumn and the young man for winter. Papus connected the card with the Absolute; in his own commentary Waite called the reading that it represents the absolute "ridiculous".
A title from the Mantegna cards
Romain Merlin, quoted in the British Museum's 1876 catalogue, thought the card took its title from the Prima Causa, the last card of the engraved Italian series called the Mantegna cards, a diagram of the world on the Ptolemaic system. He found the tarot figure hard to explain: "sometimes a naked woman much like a savage, at other times a naked woman dancing".
Read next
- Next in Tarot cardsAce of WandsThe ace of wands in the tarot's Minor Arcana: a hand issuing from a cloud and grasping a stout wand in leaf. A. E. Waite read it as creation, invention, enterprise and beginnings.
- The same shape in Angel numbers000 angel numberThree zeros, read by angel-number writers as a message about God and wholeness. Doreen Virtue’s 1999 list called 000 a reminder that “you are one with God” and a sign that a situation has come full circle.
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 circles, letters and numbers or squares and rectangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 3, 2026. How we research
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