The Star

The seventeenth trump is at the centre of the deepest split in modern occult tarot, and the split turns on a single sentence.

The Golden Dawn assigned the Star the letter Tzaddi, the sign Aquarius, and the twenty-eighth path from Netzach to Yesod. In 1904 Aleister Crowley produced the text he called Liber AL vel Legis, which states that Tzaddi is not the Star. Crowley treated this as a correction to be worked out rather than a riddle to be admired, and his eventual solution, published in The Book of Thoth, exchanges the attributions of the Star and the Emperor: the Star takes Heh and Aquarius, the Emperor takes Tzaddi and Aries.

Because the Hebrew letters carry the Tree of Life paths, the swap is not cosmetic. It relocates two trumps on the Tree and rearranges everything that depends on their placement. Thoth-deck readers and Thelemites generally use it. Golden Dawn traditionalists, Waite-derived readers and most published correspondence tables do not.

There is no neutral ground from which to adjudicate, because the case for the swap rests on the authority of a revealed text and the case against rests on the authority of a lodge system that its own members later disputed. What can be said plainly is that both schemes are in print, that they contradict each other, and that a table of correspondences which does not name its lineage cannot be relied upon for this card.

The image itself, a figure pouring from two vessels beneath stars, one vessel onto land and one into water, is old, stable, and untouched by the argument.

The Star's position in the sequence does most of the interpretive work, and it is worth stating the sequence plainly: Devil, Tower, Star. Bondage, collapse, and then this.

That placement gives the card its dominant reading, which is not simply hope but hope after damage. The figure is uncovered, at night, in the open, doing something quiet and unhurried. Nothing is being achieved. Nothing is being defended. Readers who take the card as straightforward optimism tend to lose the thing that makes it distinctive, which is that it describes a state available only to someone who has already lost something.

The second common reading is exposure in the neutral sense: being seen, being without cover, and finding that survivable. A third is replenishment, the pouring of water back into a depleted situation, which follows the picture directly.

A fourth, from the astrological layer, reads the card through Aquarius as a matter of the wider world rather than the private one: the querent's situation understood as part of something larger, and relief arriving through community rather than effort. This reading depends entirely on the Golden Dawn attribution and disappears in Crowley's system.

Waite gives loss, theft and abandonment for the reversed card. Readers who do not turn cards read a Star among bleak neighbours as hope that has not yet been believed, which is usually more accurate to what the querent is describing.

Of all the trumps this is the one whose meaning depends least on its attribution and most on its position, which is convenient given that its attribution is the single most disputed assignment in the deck.