Justice

✦ Associations

Air / Libra (Venus)

✦ Keywords

Discerning the truth, unbiased perception, accepting responsibility and making reparations, adjustment, re-balancing, equity.

✦ Quote

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced. — James Baldwin

✦ Meaning

✦ Introduction - Concept and Iconography

The concept of justice is one we're probably all familiar with, bringing to mind ideas of right and wrong, impartiality, truth, equality—or the lack thereof. The classic image in most Tarot decks is based on the Greek goddess of law, order, and fairness, Themis (Roman counterpart Justitia) with her iconic sword and scales. Today, Themis is immortalized in courthouse statues across the land as Lady Justice, whose blindfold (a later addition not original to Themis) is meant to signify impartial judgment to all who enter the hallowed halls of law—a promise as hollow as those halls themselves. In the words of one of my oldest friends Sara, known as Mrs. D. to her high school History class in New Orleans, Louisiana, “we don’t have a justice system; we have a legal system.”

✦ Critique of the Legal System

What Mrs. D. means is that our laws, and their enforcement and prosecution, claim to be just but are often far from it. Consider institutionalized racism at all levels of government, racist drug laws that target BIPOC, misogynist anti-abortion and contraception laws, legislation against the rights of transgender people, the state-sanctioned murder of Black and Brown people by the police, the prison-industrial complex that profits off of imprisoning people and keeping them there, and the incarceration rates of BIPOC, transgender folx, and the poor compared to white, cisgender, middle-and-upper class people—and that's just a scant few of the injustices codified in our “justice” system. In many countries, but certainly in the United States where I am writing this during the uprising against the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many many other Black Americans by police, the scales of justice have been tampered with to tip in the favor of the privileged and powerful and even to do their bidding. This is a necessary and vital distinction to be made when we’re talking about Justice in Tarot and in reality: justice and law are not the same thing. In fact, in our times and throughout history, they’re more often opposed than aligned.

✦ Collective and Individual Justice

So if Justice has little to do with the systems of law and order as we know them today, what is it about then? On the collective level, it’s about re-balancing those rigged scales of temporal justice. It’s about righting wrongs that have become structural in our societies. It’s about reparations, equity, redistribution of power, and action. On the individual level, Justice is about taking a reckoning in our own lives, about discerning what’s out of balance and how to right it, about taking responsibility, about learning from the past in order to take action in the present to change the future. Perhaps impartial Lady Justice with her blindfold is no justice at all. Perhaps the blindfold needs to come off so we can look the truth in the face. Not impartial justice, then, but restorative justice.

✦ Card Imagery and Maat

In our card for Fifth Spirit Tarot, Justice walks away from the crumbling house of law with unobscured vision, as is true to Justice's roots as Themis and as is preserved in most Tarot decks since the system's beginning. Our Justice's scales are not empty, however, but contain a heart being weighed against a feather, an allusion that goes back beyond Themis to their predecessor in ancient Egypt: the goddess Maat. Maat was the goddess of justice and law but also of truth, balance, wisdom, harmony, and morality, and of the seasons and stars and cosmic order (as opposed to chaos). According to Egyptian mythology, when a person died their soul went to the underworld to be judged on a set of scales by Anubis, who would weigh the person's heart against Maat's feather of truth. If their heart was equal to or lighter than the feather, they were deemed to have led an honorable life and their soul would move on towards paradise. If their heart was heavier than the feather, they were deemed unworthy and their soul would be devoured by a crocodile-headed demoness to languish forever in the underworld. This is the origin of Justice and their scales: a model reckoning, as well as a principle of honor to live by. The heart has a memory that records one's deeds, and the heart, as ever, does not lie.

✦ The Sword and Truth

But, lest we think that Justice is only about the scales, let's bring our attention to the sword. In Tarot, a perfectly vertical upright sword is a symbol for clarity and truth and, as Rachel Pollack puts it in Seventy-eight Degrees, “the idea that wisdom is like a sword piercing through the illusion of events to find the inner meaning.” Here, we have not merely the bare truth as in verifiable facts, but the wisdom to perceive beyond the surface of things to their true nature. The sword is like Maat's feather in that it can pierce to the heart of the matter and read the tales written there. The sword is a symbol of truth and it also exposes the truth. In modern parlance, it cuts through the bullshit.

✦ Reckoning and Action

And now we begin to come to the real message of Justice as it applies to our lives, our selves, and our souls. We have done the weighing and balancing; we have discerned the truth in our hearts, but our job is not done yet because Justice asks for a reckoning. Justice asks us to act. It's not good enough to declare a thing unjust if we're not taking action to rectify it. Pollack points out that the two-edged sword signifies choice, and there's the heart of the Justice card: “Life requires us to make decisions; at the same time each decision, once made, cannot be revoked. It becomes part of us. We are formed by the actions we have taken in the past; we form our future selves by the actions we take now.”

✦ Survey and Action

From the fulcrum of the scales, and from the center of the Major Arcana, Justice surveys the past, the present, and the likely future. They perceive the whole of the story, the long procession of choices, the deeds recorded in the heart, with unclouded discernment. And then Justice puts down the scales and takes up the sword. The sword is truth, and choice, and action, and with it they do what is needed to readjust the scales into rightness and alignment. They demand change. They take action. They deliver justice.

✦ Final Image

Justice walks away from the corrupt and crumbling house of the law and into the world, sword upright and upraised, scales askew with a heavy heart, to demand a reckoning.