Judgement

From the Latin 'iudicium' (judgment). Early Italian sources also call the card 'L'Angelo' (the angel) or 'La Tromba' (the trumpet), naming it by its most striking element. The image is taken directly from the Christian Last Judgment.

From the Marseille tradition onward an angel blows a trumpet in the sky while the dead rise from their tombs below, arms raised. The image is the Christian Last Judgment in miniature, drawn from cathedral tympana and manuscript illumination, needing no esoteric key to read.

Smith named the angel Gabriel and gave him a golden trumpet from which hangs a white flag with a red cross — the banner of resurrection. Three gray-skinned figures — a man, a woman, and a child — rise from coffin-like tombs with arms outstretched. Snowy mountains and an iced sea stretch behind them.

Gabriel's trumpet is the irrevocable call to awaken; the white flag with the red cross is resurrection and the union of spirit and matter. The three risen figures are the conscious, the unconscious, and the inner child, called forth together. The gray skin marks them as the dead — the old self being left behind. Judgement is the summons to a new life that follows the Sun's illumination.

The Marseille and Waite images are structurally similar, with Smith enriching the color and the banner. The major departure is Crowley's: in the Thoth deck he renames the card 'The Aeon' and replaces the Last Judgment with the Thelemic vision of the goddess Nut arching over the sky, the winged disk Hadit at center, and the child Horus within an egg of light — the shift from the 'Aeon of Osiris' (sacrifice) to the 'Aeon of Horus' (self-sovereignty).

The card draws on the Christian Last Judgment, the Egyptian resurrection of Osiris, and the mystery-school rite of rebirth. In Jungian terms it is the final stage of individuation — the call to leave the old self in the tomb. As trump number 20 it is the penultimate awakening that prepares the wholeness of the World.