The World

From the Latin 'mundus' (world, cosmos). Early Italian sources also call the card 'La Terra' (the earth) or 'L'Universo' (the universe). The name denotes not the political world but the whole of creation, the cosmos in its completeness.

From the Visconti-Sforza deck onward a dancer — often androgynous — stands within a wreath, with the four living creatures (man, eagle, lion, ox) at the four corners. The image echoes medieval depictions of Christ in majesty surrounded by the four evangelists, and the four creatures are already fixed in the earliest versions.

Smith placed a naked, androgynous dancer within a green wreath, wrapped in a purple sash that loops in a horizontal figure-eight. The dancer holds two wands. In the four corners hover the four living creatures — man, eagle, lion, and ox — each holding a book, against a blue sky.

The wreath is the completed circle, the successful end of a cycle; the purple figure-eight sash is infinity and eternity. The androgynous dancer is the integrated self that unites all opposites, and the two wands mark the balanced dualities held in either hand. The four living creatures are the four evangelists, the four fixed signs of the zodiac, and the four elements — the whole of creation witnessing the dance.

The Marseille World sometimes gives the dancer a wand or a papal veil, but the core image is constant. Waite emphasized the dance of completion. In the Thoth deck Crowley renames the card 'The Universe', attributes it to Saturn, and frames it within an ouroboros serpent ring with the ten Kabbalistic spheres and the four creatures — a cosmic synthesis.

The card draws on the four living creatures of Ezekiel and Revelation, the Neoplatonic 'Anima Mundi' (world soul), and the Kabbalistic sphere of Malkuth, the manifest kingdom. Astrologically it corresponds to Saturn, the limit that completes. As trump number 21 it is the end of the Major Arcana — the wholeness in which the Fool's journey culminates and from which a new cycle can begin.