Justice & The Emperor: Polarities of Power in Tarot

The occult allows us to empower ourselves within our own stories, offering systems of language to explore the narratives we live within and tools to change the path before us. Astrology guides us through a journey of development and integration, with each sign occupying a unique point of discovery and evolution. It’s an incredible system with the potential to explain imperceivable depths and nuance. Still, I often hear people say that astrology is too rigid, too calculated. It has a reputation as a stone-carved set of truths with no flexibility or potential for change.

However, metaphysics are littered with echoes and reflections and so often, one system blends seamlessly into another. If you gravitate to a particular system of spiritual expression, it’s easy to transition into another through your understanding of the story it tells. And this is absolutely the case with astrology.

Astrology and tarot share a long and rich association. Nearly every tarot scholar has tied the two systems together, tweezing details from astrological theory to inform tarot symbolism and use. It’s easy to see astrology as a black and white system, a series of dualities that exist solely on opposite ends of a pole. Signs and planets seem magnetically charged, drawn together or forced apart regardless of individual interference. And while opposition does play a large role in astrology, it’s less like a magnet and more like a coin, presenting two expressions of the same energy.

Justice, the 11th card of the major arcana in the Rider-Smith deck and beyond, is associated with Libra, emphasizing the sign’s association with balance and harmony above all. In her left hand she holds a scale, empty but level, waiting to receive that which must be weighed. In her right, a sword is raised above her head, symbolic of her ability to cut through illusion. It’s important to remember that Swords in tarot represent logic, rationality, communication, thought, the very heady air element from which Libra as a sign is born. Within the air triplicity, it is Cardinal, the noblest, and Justice wears a golden crown bearing a square stone, echoing the circle-within-a-square of her brooch: the nature of order, structures for wholeness.