The Star

✦ Associations

Air / Aquarius (Uranus)

✦ Keywords

Hope, inner calm, inspiration, healing after hardship, restoration after depletion, radical self-acceptance and honesty.

✦ Quote

I touch my own skin, and it tells me that before there was any harm, there was miracle. — Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Activism

✦ Meaning

✦ Calm after the Tower

The Star finds us in the calm after the destruction of the Tower, after the shock, after the wailing and raging and the five (ten, twenty) stages of grief. It’s the North Star by which we find our bearings, the glimmering light that guides us where to go from here, the ever-burning distant star of hope.

✦ Celestial Sequence

The Star begins what some Tarot practitioners call the "Celestial Sequence," the trio of heavenly bodies that are the Star, the Moon, and the Sun. According to Robert M. Place, they are ordered as such for their luminescence in the sky, leading us along a brightening path to enlightenment, a word that literally means "to lighten." We're metaphorically leaving the Earth here—the bird is a symbol of the ascension of the soul—released from our mundane bonds through a process that began with the Hanged One and climaxed in the Devil and the Tower. As a result, the following cards become increasingly spiritual and mystical in their interpretations. This is certainly true of the Star.

✦ Source and Water Symbolism

In the Star, our souls come back into contact with Source, which is to say the divine, the unconscious, the life-giving waters, the universe—whatever is the goddess of our understanding. In Fifth Spirit Tarot and in many decks including the Smith-Waite and Marseille Tarots, Source is symbolized by the pool of water, lit as if glowing from within, that our Star-person sits beside. This is the same water as with the High Priestess, the water from which intuition flows. But where the High Priestess contained the waters in a bowl (Fifth Spirit) or behind a veil (Smith-Waite), the Star sits at the natural, overflowing wellspring of it. The Star has one leg in the water and one curled under them on the land, showing that they are in contact with both Source and the material, temporal world simultaneously. This parallels and expands upon Temperance, who also straddled land and water and who also held two vessels. However, where Temperance conserved the contents of their vessels, the Star allows them to flow forth with the trust that they will never empty, or that if they do become empty, they will be filled again.

✦ Star as Aqueduct

In Fifth Spirit, the Star scoops water with one pitcher and fills another with the same, flowing from their open, upturned palm. The second pitcher overflows, pouring water onto the land, from which rivulets run to return to the pool. The Star is an aqueduct, a conduit, sluicing inspiration from the unconscious realm of Source and into the here and now, from whence it flows again into the never-ending pool. In the Star, we learn that we aren't only in contact with the waters, we are a part of them. Like a grand, cosmic water cycle, we are each moving the energy of Source through us all of the time, receiving it and pouring it forth, transmuting it from liquid to vapor to condensation to precipitation, flowing in rivers and water tables, ceaselessly and unerringly trickling our way back to the sea.

✦ Nakedness and Self-Acceptance

The Star is naked and unashamed, the soul laid bare by the Tower and delivered into total self-acceptance and honesty.

✦ Apokalypsis and Renewal

I like the way Jessa Crispin puts it in The Creative Tarot: "The Star is when you're so shaken and exhausted that you can't pretend anymore. Stripped of external methods of protection, you're vulnerable and absolutely true." This distillation of spirit, this unveiling (apokalypsis) of soul, this elemental self-truth—this is only possible from that eternity-space in the aftermath of the collapse. This is the star that can only be seen from the bottom of a well. And this is the star whose silvery light reveals the hand-holds that guide our way out. When everything else falls away, all we have left is ourselves, and we find that's all we've ever needed.

✦ Guidance and Healing

When the Star appears in a reading, it signals hope and self-trust. It's a reminder to look for our North Star, which is our authentic truth, and to set our internal compass to it. Like the star inside the Hermit's lantern, this is the light of the soul, the flame that will show us the way. The Star is also a card of profound healing, where we're radically accepted in all of our messiness and bloodiness and invited to dip into the pool's healing waters when we're ready. The Star does not tell us that everything will be okay, but that it's okay to be not okay, and that okay and not-okay aren't mutually exclusive. The Star is a card dear to artists because its contact with Source is what artists seek. It's the magic that transforms pain and grief and life experience into beauty. The Star is inspiration.

✦ Inspiration Etymology

And "inspiration" is perhaps the single best word for the Star. The word comes from the Latin inspīrāre, meaning "to breathe into," connecting the card to its astrological sign of Aquarius (actually an air sign), and to the soul-soothing power of breathwork. "Inspiration" is still used by doctors to mean the drawing of air into the lungs, the opposite action of "expiration," or the releasing of air from the lungs. "Inspiration," then, is literally the returning of breath after we've lost it. As Temperance was rebirth after Death, so the Star is a rebirth after the Tower, an inspiration after expiration. A lesser-known use of "inspiration" is also a feeling of ease from grief or trouble, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a phrase that may as well have been plucked from any description of the Star.

✦ Everyday Examples

The Star is the poem that tore from you like a gale onto the paper, necessary and razor-edged, which when you penned the final word filled you with a sensation of such lightness and gratitude that you laughed, truly laughed, for the first time in weeks. The Star is the peace that snuck up on you one day while making tea, that timeless moment watching the steam rise, inhaling its herbal scent, forgetting that your insides were still missing somewhere, scraped out by the grapefruit spoon of grief. It's the buoyant morning when you opened your eyes to a new bedroom, sun striping the piled boxes and bare bookshelf waiting for books, and you were for the first time in five years truly and wonderfully alone. It's the mirror that you stood before to unwind your bandages, every movement an ache, a sharp tug at your healing stitches, and all of it worth it when you beheld your body, when you sobbed in recognition of you. You, here, and whole.

✦ Trailing Colon

: