17 - The Star Tarot Card

The Star is tarot card number 17, although it is the 18^th card of the Major Arcana because the 1^st of the 22 Major Arcana cards is number 0 (The Fool).

The Star tarot card may appear in a spread as a reminder that the querent is literally the "star" (main character) of his or her own life. It is also a spiritual card that conveys the concept of understanding through intuition.

It may be explained as follows: There are various ways in which people can understand things. For example, in a school or college environment understanding is often used to mean being able to give (logical) reasons for something, to justify it, or to cite certain associated facts. This is very different from, for example, understanding a person, a phrase and concept that is often intended to convey the idea of empathizing with someone, that is being able to imagine what it must be like to experience his or her circumstances from his or her point of view and, to a certain extent, doing so in order to support the person by accompanying him or her through an emotional situation. The Star tarot card is more concerned with the latter meaning of understanding, i.e. as in empathy, but its meaning is not restricted to apply only to people. It may concern intuitive understanding of a particular situation, relationship, job, direction, or idea.

In the cases of the Rider Waite and Robin Wood decks The Star tarot card depicts a nude figure of a young woman on one bended knee with the other foot in a stream or pool. In both cases, there is much symbolism in The Star tarot card. The nudity of the figure indicates that she has "nothing to hide", the eight-pointed star above her represents infinity, the water she is pouring onto the land beside the stream/pool divides into 5 small trickles representing the five senses.

Some words and phrases associated with The Star tarot card include:

Bright prospects
Hope
Faith
A need for cleansing
Occult Arts
A need for inner clarity
Self-confidence (present, or needed)
Self-Trust (present, or needed)

Note: The image of this tarot card shown on the right (above-right) is from an early French tarot deck that has been made available for general use via the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. This shows a distinctly different style of illustration from that of modern tarot decks but is of historical and artistic interest.

The Gilded Tarot (Book and Tarot Deck Set)

More about the Major Arcana

The cards of the Major Arcana are widely considered to be the most powerful cards in the Tarot Deck. The 22 cards of the Major Arcana tell a complete story when arranged in upright and numerical order (beginning with 0 - The Fool then progressing through the sequence of Major Arcana cards until 21 - The World).
This is a story of personal development and enlightenment that is sometimes referred to as "The Fool's Journey".

Some texts also include meanings for "reversed cards". These are for the situation in which the cards are shuffled in both order and orientation. The theoretical advantage to this is that it effectively doubles the number of possible "cards" in the deck from 78 to 156. However, in terms of the calculation of obtaining results according to chance alone, it is not a simple mathematical doubling because once a card has been drawn it cannot be drawn again in the opposite orientation in the same reading.

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