Major Arcana · XXI
♄︎ Saturn (and Earth) · ת Tav · Thoth: The Universe
A cycle is complete. Celebrate it, gather what you have learned, and step into the next stage whole.
Tav, the mark or cross, is the last letter, the seal: in Ezekiel 9 the angel sets a Tav on the foreheads of the righteous, and in the old Hebrew script it was written as a cross, X or +. Its value is 400. It is a Double letter; in Kaplan’s Sepher Yetzirah its opposites are Grace and Ugliness. As the last letter it completes the alphabet, and the Golden Dawn gives it both Saturn and Earth.
The 32nd path rises from Malkuth to Yesod: the first path of the ascent, the gateway out of the material world into the astral. The Golden Dawn’s Theoricus grade opens with the candidate’s passage along it, through the temple of Saturn, guided by the Kerubic beasts. Its 32 Paths name, the Administrative Intelligence, “directs the seven planets in their courses”, since everything above passes through it into the world.
Smith’s World is a dancing woman, naked except for a purple scarf, holding a wand in each hand, within an oval wreath tied with red ribbons. The four Kerubim (man, eagle, bull and lion) watch from the corners. Waite calls it “the perfection and end of the Cosmos”; Case’s key word is cosmic consciousness: the dancer is the self, freed and moving in perfect rhythm with the universe.
Crowley’s Universe shows a young woman dancing with a serpent within an ellipse of seventy-two circles (the quinaries of the zodiac), while a great eye of God watches and the four Kerubim in the corners pour out water. At the bottom is the plan of the House of Matter, based on the periodic table of the elements as known in 1944. Crowley calls her the completion of the Great Work, “the Great Work accomplished”, and the end that is also the beginning: the dancing maiden is Heh final, the Daughter, who will be set on the throne of the Mother.
Card image: Pamela Colman Smith, Rider-Waite tarot, 1909 (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).