Judgment reversed: Day 4
They have risen from the dead. How long have they been dead? Does that matter? No—what matters is the call, the trumpet of renewal has sounded by the lips of the angel Gabriel, the giver of divine messages. It’s their second coming, their chance at new life.
This card gets to the heart of the midwinter season. Why are we waiting? What are we waiting for? Though I’m not a Christian, I am interested in winter practices and traditions. Maybe it’s my time of life, maybe it’s because of where I’ve been living which doesn’t have the force of winter that I grew up with, but I’ve come to realize how much I need the winter and the dark, at the least, to balance out summer’s crushing brilliance. Western culture is a world of extroversion, and one of my needs as a neurodivergent is a lot of time hibernating; I thrive in winter.
In Eleanor Parker’s book Winters in the World, she explores the cultures of people who spoke Old English in the early Middle Ages through the lens of the seasons. Advent came to be about something very complex about time: that you both wait for something that has already happened, as if it hasn’t happened yet, and wait for something that is to come but you don’t know when. Parker says, “the preparation for Christmas involves thinking simultaneously about two frames of time…[they are] to imagine themselves back into a time when the birth of Christ was still in the future, the subject of prophecies but not yet of reality; at the same time, they were also meant to use Advent to look towards the eventual future, the Apocalypse” (64). Christian Advent is the season of waiting for Christ’s birth which has both already happened and has not happened yet (eternal return, thinking Mercea Eliade here), and waiting for the Apocalypse, of the second coming of Christ. It’s somehow both cyclical and eschatological.
Though in a way, winter’s arrival is the end of the world, from a seasonal perspective: plants die back to nothing but their roots and ice imprisons the land. Parker also points out the similarity of Old Norse mythology: “fimbulvetr, the ‘mighty winter’ that will precede the coming of Ragnarök, the doom of the gods” where there will be three years of winter, no summer in between, snow will blow from all directions at once, wolves will consume celestial bodies, floods will rage, and “monsters will destroy the gods themselves” (62). This is the end.
But there’s something crucial to the end: it’s also a beginning (it’s a coming and a going). There’s always a beginning at the end of something. So even as the dead in the Tarot card of Judgment have long been dead, for their flesh is pale and gray, they’re called to rise. Even as the Second Coming calls for the end of the world, its end makes space for a new beginning: new light. The plants that die in winter return from roots reinvigorated during a time of rest. Of waiting for new light.
Though it’s easy to think that time of judgment must be a serious and frightening matter, the image of Judgment tells a different story: the dead who have risen at the call of Gabriel are rejoicing for they’ve had enough distance from their actions that they’re able to look upon themselves from an objective perspective and evaluate without attachment. They’re able to realize those experiences they’ve stuffed into the corners of their bodies are far enough away that they can perceive them critically.
And so this card, in its reversed position, drawn at the beginning of Advent, tells me: be patient. Wait. Give distance to that which needs judged. The time will come when it’s appropriate for evaluation. And maybe it’s even saying understanding is not necessary yet.
For now, I am a daffodil, nestling into the frozen ground, getting my appropriate time of cold and dark. I relish in it (or as the dwarves say in The Hobbit: “We like the dark. Dark for dark business.”). I need the dark in order to thrive. This is dark business…..for now.
Bibliography:
Parker, Eleanor. Winters in the World, A Journey Through the Anglo-Saxon Year. Reaktion Books Ltd, London. 2022.
(My Tarot deck is Llewellyn’s Classic Tarot by Barbara Moore and illustrated by Eugene Smith.)