Strength and Justice placements

Thread originally posted on the Aeclectic Tarot Forum on 12 May 2003, and now archived in the Forum Library.

Moonstitches	12 May 2003
Umm...how shall i say this... Well i know that the RWS deck has the Strength card numbered 8 and Justice as 11. And I think that older decks have had Strength at 11 and Justice 8. I was wondering if anyone could explain the reason behind the changing in the ordering between these 2 cards?

jmd	12 May 2003
This is one of those wonderful discussions which periodically recurs... and an important one indeed. Before looking at their numbering, it is worth pointing out that some very early decks were un-numbered, or had different numbers to the ones we are more familiar with (it may be worth checking, also, the various Major Arcana threads in the History and Iconography section) Essentially, the Marseilles pattern (in which VIII is Justice, and XI Strength) was switched by the Golden Dawn (of which Waite was a member) because of a sequence of correlations: 1 - Hebrew letters were correlated in a particular way to the Major Arcana (other correlations also abound); 2 - Hebrew letters have, in some classical Kabbalistic texts (such as the Sefer Yetzirah ) astrological correlations; 3 - by switching VIII and XI, the card images seemed to better reflect presumed astrological correlations (Justice as Libra and Strength as Leo) There are other discussions on this, and I'll link relevant threads unless others beat me to it (very likely given my time at hand! :)) Hope this helps.

Moonstitches	13 May 2003
thanks jmd! Your answer really helped me clear my confusion :)

The Strength and Justice placements thread was originally posted on 12 May 2003 in the Using Tarot Cards board, and is now archived in the Forum Library. Read the active threads in Using Tarot Cards, or read more archived threads.