Justice
The Justice card represents balance, fairness, and the weighing of actions, embodied by the Egyptian goddess Maat. It emphasizes that choices have consequences and that one may be confronted with outcomes that require restoring balance or making amends. The card also warns against being overly rule-bound, highlighting the need for mercy and consideration of emotions. In contemporary terms it can illustrate distorted or punitive forms of justice as a cautionary example of bad karma.
Keywords
Correspondences
Libra
Keywords
Justitia, the judge, the harmony of the universe, the goddesses Maat, Themis and Nemesis, fairness, truth, balance, reward and punishment, gaining distance from one’s own subjective view of the world and taking other standpoints into consideration, a law‐suit or other legal matter.
Meaning
The Thoth Tarot has the old Egyptian goddess Maat as the personification for Justice. Maat was present at the judgment of souls in the afterlife where she put a feather on the scales when the dead person's heart was examined. If the heart was heavier than her feather ‐ i.e. the deceased had unbalanced justice by his misdeeds, his heart was fed to the crocodile god Sobek and that was the end of that. If the feather was heavier than the person's heart, Osiris would welcome them to all the pleasures of the afterlife.
Guidance
Therefore the Justice card exhorts us to be fair, and to realize that we may be confronted with the results of our choices. If we have chosen badly, we need to restore the balance and make amends. We may also be too preoccupied with the rules and too little with emotions and the concept of mercy and generosity.
Exploring the Card
This card is a little guilty of sacrificing traditional meaning to the artist’s personal whim. Basically this is a joke at the expense of good old Aleister Crowley, who drew up the figure of Maat for the Thoth Tarot. Maat’s feather became the attribute of Justice in Crowley's deck.
Illustration
Well, Umbridge is meting out her own warped justice with her sadistic feather detention treatment, and so she made the cut for Justice, standing before the great Ministry seal that warns offenders that ignorance does not excuse any wrongdoing. Of course if Justice also stands for the retribution for creating bad karma, at least Umbridge can serve as a case study and a warning.
Visual Description
A dignified middle-aged woman stands full-length before a heavy carved wooden door, wearing a long coat and low-heeled shoes. She holds a bundled rod or palm-like object in both hands while a large round medallion behind her displays a pair of scales and a Latin inscription. Swirling ribbon-like flourishes frame the figure, a Roman numeral VIII is centered at the top border, and the title 'Justice' is printed at the bottom.
Harry Potter tarot
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