Quote:
Originally Posted by HoneyBea
However, I do find it hard to see this in this card and it does speak more loudly of a journey that can be completed and will lift you to another level of understanding and gives you the ability to move forward to the next goal.
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A stunningly beautiful card, I find it significant that it appears that she's been using skulls a her stepping stones. She has one foot on a rock-like skull, while her hands are holding to slender tree branches to remain balanced on that one foot. So she stands on death with one foot, yet holds to the tree of life (if you will) with both hands. Likewise we have this balance between dark and light, between land and water.
The message of the world is mastery and completion, of slow, steady work or study rewarded, of being able to travel where ever you like. Symbolically, I see all that here in this card. The Lady, with delicate, seemingly precarious, but sure steps, finds her way across the water. She knows how to use both death and the fragile support life offers to maintain her balance, and follows what light there is through the darkness.
She isn't moving swiftly, but carefully, and one feels that she plans each step, like a dancer creating a dance. There's also every possibility that she's leaving bad things behind, or at least heading with eyes open to whatever awaits her. This is a very telling contrast in a deck where most of the people pictured seem to be unwittingly drawn by supernatural forces in some fatal direction, rather than deliberately and consciously making their own path.
This is, to me, very much the spirit of the World card, it's steady ambition and sagaciousness.