Anna K. 8 Justice

Ann K. 8 Justice

This cards shows a man sitting at a desk on a plateform. There is a book on the desk, and the man is holding a sword. The scales are carved on the front of the desk. The floor has a black&white checkered floor. Behind the man the red drapes part to show a shinning sun.

The books explains that in addition to fairness it also means having objectivity, being ispassionate and keeping a cool head. Also, this card can mean exaggerated black&white thinking, intolerance of ambiguity, and lack of clemency.

ambiguity-uncertainty
clemency-disposition to be merciful and especially to moderate the severity of punishment due, and also it can mean an act or instance of leniency

Justice to me means fairness. At least I hope that would be the case.

Justice is one of the tarot's cardinal virtues.

I think Justice holding the sword in this card could mean it cuts through the dishonesty and delusion. This card could mean there is someone coming into our life that could possibly give us a solution, or it could mean for us to keep a balance.

Does anyone know a professional name for the balance symbol?
Again, we see the black and white checkered floor. Perhaps all these b&w floors are telling us that things are not so black and white?

Why do I have a block with this card? I'm not going to avoid it any longer. Ya know what: this card doesn't inspire me. IMO, the depiction isn't powerful enough for the concept. The person is too small, the expression on his face is too partial, the scales are hard to see and should stand out.
I just answered my own question. That's why I feel turned off to this card. The floor is a little interesting (black and white, but not a checkerboard pattern; they really look like piano keys), but it doesn't intrigue me like the other floors did. This just doesn't look like Justice to me. Justice should appear bigger than life, in some way.
But now I'm thinking about it more ...
Anna portrays Justice as a human characteristic, not as a spiritual virtue or concept (unlike Judgment, which has a spiritual/supernatural dimension with the angel). Temperance is also depicted in human terms.
Maybe she makes a distinction and believes that Justice and Temperance are human constructs, while Judgement, The Wheel, Death & the Devil all convey a supernatural contstruct (the Chariot, too, with its flying in the air).

On the human plane, Justice is really "justice" (small 'j'), meaning that it is always subjective, subject to error and open to interpretation. If it's human, it can never be perfect. It doesn't even exist as a perfect ideal - it's a completely relative concept. So it's "justice ... relative to ..."

On the spiritual or archetypal plane, on the other hand, Justice can exist as in Ideal, like an Aristotelian ideal.
Am I just going off on a tangent here? I'd love to hear from Anna on this.
Now I'm going thru and looking at all the MA's to see if the depictions are human (the Star is, the Sun is, actually even the Devil is, now that I look at it more closely) or in some way 'otherworldly' or occult (Death & Judgment, probably also the Wheel).
Interesting ...

I quite like this card. Two things stand out to me, both mentioned by you, Dr. Girlfriend.

The first is the scales. Yes, I agree, they don't stand out at all and I'd have liked to have seen them made much brighter myself, but looking at their beckground, they are housed by two huge circles that remind me of the large round eyes of a wise owl.

And yes, I recently mentioned in another thread by Sulis how the black and white platform was more like a piano/organ keyboard.

So my interpritation of this card is that Justice is indeed good, wise and usually fair, but the problem is that not everyone dances to the same tune and what one thinks is fair justice, another may disagree with.

I notice colour symbolism in this card. The black and white are darkness and light - the columns of severity and mercy, the black and white floor with its large squares. The woman (it's a woman IMO) wears green and red clothing, and the drapery behind her is red. They are complementary colours, i.e. the strongest possible contrast after black and white (which are total absence of light vs. light). But if you mix these two colors, you get brown. The desk and the book are both brown.

So I think the principle of justice like illustrated here is: knowing the abstract and pure characteristics of light and darkness, and of the different contrasting values of life. And then finding just the right mixture of mercy and severity to come to a judgment that does justice to perpetrator and victim and to society (humanity) in general.

The figure itself is rather small because the abstract principles loom so large, and a justice/seeking person has to find the proper balance without taking his/her own ego too seriously. The jewel on the crown and the sword mean that this is a rational process, not an emotional one. The many small tiles that make up the floor squares also hint to me that the process of justice is done by piecing together small parts, not by sweeping gestures.

The card is very symmetrical. The woman's cloak and clasp, the two circles - if you cut the card in the middle and mirrored it, you would get nearly the same image. The only difference: on the woman's left side (our right), you have the white column of clemency and the book, and on the woman's right side, the black column of severity and the sword. So these are the two options.

The sword touches both columns - its dark handle touches the dark column, its bright tip touches the white column.

The swords is made from hard metal, the book from perishable paper. Both meet on the brown wooden desk. If you lighten up the color of this brown, you get the gold of the crown, and if you take the gold and infuse it with light, you get the halo behind the woman's head.

The woman btw reminds me a bit of the famous Naumburg statue of Uta.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Naumburg-Uta.JPG

So if I look at this image longer, I see a movement of the black and white, the red and green, becoming fused with each other in the act of justice, and being lifted up into gold and light. Well, these are just my associations.

A very clever card, very balanced (not only the colours, also the forms: square and round forms).