Lady Justice

Recently, I’ve become one of the mangers of Biddy Tarot’s Pinterest account.  I manage the boards focusing on the Major Arcana as well as the board “Tarot in Real Life”. It’s been an interesting project to work on and I’ve had to face some cards that aren’t really my favorite cards in the deck, like The Emperor, The Hierophant and Justice. I find the energy of these cards to be restrictive, structured and stern and being a free spirited person, my energy clashes with them.

I built the Justice board last night and I admit that I’d put it off for  a few days because it reminds me of an unpleasant situation I’ve been dealing  with the for the past couple of years that has been expensive and  emotionally exhausting.  But last night, something changed about the way I see Justice after putting a little more in depth study into the card.

I guess the thing that really turned me off to the Justice card in the past was the grumpy looking manish lady staring straight ahead. In the Tarot, Justice is not blind and it always made me feel that the truth can be overlooked.

But then I started looking at mythological archetypes associated with Justice.  I was unaware, for instance, of Lady Justice’s role in Greek mythology and her connection with the goddess Maat. On the masculine end, there’s Archangel Michael, who is said to be the one who weighs the dead. Michael is also depicted with a sword and scales, much like Lady Justice.  These archetypes are all fair judges and it reminded me that Justice CAN be fair even though the current system in America doesn’t always work the way it should.

There are some beautiful paintings of Lady Justice that do her more Justice (har) than the Rider Waite image.  As it turns out, in order to get comfortable with the card and see the beauty in its meaning, I had to dig a little deeper into the history of the imagery to get a clear picture of what it’s all about.