1. Tarot
2. Card meanings
3. The World

Major Arcana · XXI

The World

• assured success
• recompense
• voyage
• change of place

Upright meaning

Completion and wholeness. Waite calls it the perfection and end of the Cosmos: a cycle finished, with the sense of a journey or change of place ahead.

Reversed meaning

Reversed, Waite gives inertia, fixity and permanence: something not yet ready to move. A prompt to name the last step still open.

• fixity
• permanence

Symbolism

A dancing figure inside a great oval wreath, with a winged creature in each corner.

Group

Major Arcana

Element, astrology

Not given by Waite, so we give none

Source

Our own plain-English summary of A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London: Rider, 1911), Part II §2 (symbolism); Part III §3 (divinatory meanings). The keywords are Waite’s own words. Waite’s fortune-telling lists also contain harsher terms; we keep to the reflective readings he gives and never state an event as certain.

Tarot is a tool for reflection, not a prediction of fixed outcomes. This is not medical, legal or financial advice.