Tarot · Major Arcana
Judgement
Key XX - Fire
Correspondences
- Element
- Fire
- Planet
- Pluto
- Sign
- Scorpio
- Number
- 20
- Yes / no
- Yes upright, No reversed
Traditional Golden Dawn attributions. The yes / no value is a convention for single-card questions, not a prediction.
Upright
A call to rise and account for who you have become is arriving.
Judgement. A call to rise and account for who you have become is arriving. Twentieth: the reckoning and the call. A whole chapter assessed honestly, and something asked of you on the strength of that assessment. Under Pluto, it works underneath and irreversibly. What this changes does not change back, and the process is not open to negotiation. Being Fire, it resolves through action rather than deliberation. Its keyword range runs through reckoning, rebirth, a calling answered, absolution, and awakening to purpose.
Reversed
The call is being ignored, or judged too harshly to be heard clearly.
Judgement reversed. The call is being ignored, or judged too harshly to be heard clearly. Its sign is Scorpio, which goes underneath: what is concealed, what is intense, and a refusal to accept the surface account of anything. Reversed here, it is loosening rather than failing. The grip of this is coming off, and the reversal reads as release rather than denial. Its keyword range, to be read here as difficulty, delay, or a lesson not yet learned: self-doubt, ignoring the call, harsh self-judgment, delayed awakening, and fear of reckoning.
About the Tarot
A 15th-century Italian card game that was turned to fortune-telling only 350 years later.
The upright and reversed meanings here follow the mainstream Rider-Waite-Smith reading tradition. A reversed card is treated as the same force blocked, turned inward, or overexpressed - not simply as its opposite.
Full history →Meanings are a guide to a symbolic tradition, offered for reflection and entertainment. They do not predict the future or describe real people or events. See the Terms.