The World (tarot card)

It can be incorporated as the final card of the Major Arcana or tarot trump sequence (the first or last optioned as being "The Fool" (0)).

In the traditional Tarot of Marseilles, as well as the later Rider–Waite tarot deck, a naked woman hovers or dances above the Earth holding a baton in each hand, surrounded by a wreath, being watched by the four living creatures (or hayyoth) of Jewish mythology: a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle.

Waite's 1910 book The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, the World card carries several divinatory associations: 21.THE WORLD—Assured success, recompense, voyage, route, emigration, flight, change of place.

As described in the book The New Mythic Tarot by Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene (p. 82), the image of the woman (Hermaphroditus in Greek Mythology) is to show wholeness unrelated to sexual identification but rather of combined male and female energy on an inner level, which integrates opposites traits that arise in the personality charged by both energies.

Opposite qualities between male and female that create turmoil in our life are joined in this card, and the image of becoming whole is an ideal goal, not something that can be possessed rather than achieved.