Justice

Justice belongs to a set. The medieval and Renaissance scheme of the cardinal virtues has four members, Justice, Temperance, Fortitude and Prudence, and the tarot trumps contain three of them. Justice, Temperance and Fortitude, the last under the name Strength, are all there in every standard pattern. Prudence is not.

This is a genuine and unresolved puzzle, and it has been argued over seriously. Some have proposed that the Hanged Man is Prudence, or that the Hermit is, or that the World is; others hold that the fourth virtue was simply never included, or was included in a lost variant. There is no manuscript that settles it. What can be said is that the absence is conspicuous, that a fifteenth-century Italian would have noticed it, and that any theory of the trumps as a coherent programme has to account for it. Theories claiming Egyptian or Kabbalistic design generally do not even try.

The number is also disputed. Justice is VIII in the older Italian and French patterns and XI in the Golden Dawn and Rider-Waite-Smith arrangement, which swapped it with Strength to make the zodiacal correspondences run in order. A statement about "the eleventh trump" therefore means different cards in different systems, and books frequently fail to say which they are using.

The image itself has been stable throughout: a seated crowned figure with a sword upright in one hand and a balance in the other. It is the standard personification, and unlike the Hermit or the Lovers it has not been reinterpreted out of recognition.

The Golden Dawn gave Justice the letter Lamed, the sign Libra, and the twenty-second path of the Tree of Life, from Geburah to Tiphareth. Lamed is an ox-goad, an instrument of correction, and Libra is the scales, so the assignment is one of the least strained in the system. Like all of them it is late nineteenth century and follows Eliphas Levi's earlier arrangement of the 1850s rather than any medieval source.

In practice this is a card most readers soften and probably should not. Its plain sense is that a matter will be decided on its merits, that the decision has already been earned by what was done, and that the querent's preferences are not an input. Where the sword and the scales are read together, the card says that a judgement will be both weighed and enforced.

The gentler modern readings, balance, fairness, harmony, integrity, are not wrong, but they blur the card into Temperance and cost it its edge. The more exact readings run to legal matters, contracts, consequences arriving on schedule, and the specific discomfort of being treated exactly as one has behaved.

Waite's reversed meanings run to legal complications, bias and undue severity, which are useful and specific. Readers who do not turn cards read the same range by asking who is holding the scales in the situation described, and whether that person is the querent. Crowley's version, retitled Adjustment, drops the moral vocabulary entirely and treats the card as the universe balancing its books, which is arguably closer to what readers actually observe.