“It has more than one message on the macrocosmic side and is, for example, the state of the restored world when the law of manifestation shall have been carried to the highest degree of natural perfection. But it is perhaps more especially a story of the past, referring to that day when all was declared to be good, when the morning stars sang together and all the Sons of God shouted for joy.”
However you look at it—the world restored, or the world in its original state of perfection—it’s a symbol of perfection.
The four living creatures correspond to the letters of the tetragram (YHVH). Those, together with the wreath, represent the Divine Powers that encompass all of creation. Inside the wreath, the woman symbolizes the creation in the act of an ecstatic dance after becoming consciously aware of herself in God. It is what Waite refers to often as the Beatific Vision, the direct experience of the Divine.
The
Waite-Trinick version follows the Golden Dawn fairly closely, though Waite’s meanings for the symbols differ from Mathers’. In the GD and the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, the World is path 32, Malkuth-Yesod, and links the World of Action with the world of Formation. This is the entire description of the Great Symbol from Waite’s FRC Theoreticus Initiation. It covers quite a bit:
“The lesson in chief of that Path of Tau, through which you have passed in your progress from the Grade of Malkuth, is shewn in the Great Symbol of the Path. Within an oval of 72 circles there is depicted a female figure having the lunar crescent on her head. The Four Living Creatures of Ezekiel’s Vision, placed outside the oval, are in correspondence with the four letters of the Sacred Name Jehovah, while the circles forming the oval are in correspondence with other Divine Names communicated in our secret tradition [The Schem ha-mephorasch, or 72 names of God]. They signify together the Divine Powers which stand about the whole creation, the in-dwelling of that Word which is intimated everywhere in Nature, but passes into expression nowhere. This is on the macrocosmic side, on which also the female figure represents the perfection of the universe as an expression of Divine Law and Order. The two wands signify active and passive, the positive and negative currents, the fixed and volatile, the inbreathing and outbreathing which alternate continually in Nature. Of these the female figure is at once the equilibrium and the synthesis. In another form of symbolism, she is in the act of dancing, to indicate the ecstasy and joy with which the harmonious creation came into manifested being. She is thus archetypal Nature, and for this reason is shewn to the Zelator on his issue from that World of Action which is Nature in travail. You now see her in all the original perfection with which she was adorned at the beginning as an Image in the Divine Mind. But she is manifested with a Veil about her, because Nature is a woman, and her mystery is not declared in this Grade. The lunar crescent intimates that all her lights are borrowed or reflected, and that their source is in God. The Star of the Heptagram above her refers to the number of creation. There is also the macropsychic side of the symbol, but its deep unfolding of the life of souls in God belongs to a later stage of your progress. I can say only that she is the law and state of Paradise, the Divine Presence within and without ourselves, represented by the Shekinah [Shekinah in manifestation as opposed to Shekinah in transcendence in the Supernal World]. There is, however, the personal, or microcosmic side of the symbol, and as such it typifies that state which is delineated by the work of the World of Formation in the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross: the re-making of man, male and female, in the perfect terms of the archetype. For us and for our concerns, the female figure is therefore the Restorer of Worlds, and of you, my Brother, in the likeness of the Elohim. For this reason she is shewn to you on the threshold of the World of Formation, whereat you now stand. She is the Guardian of the Gate.”
I tend to prefer the terms and active and reactive to Waite's active and passive.
NOTE: This is as far I'm going with this. If someone else wants to carry on with the lesser arcana or something else from the PKT, I might participate but won't be starting anything else, for now at least.