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.
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
Last reviewed September 27, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research