Tarot Card Meanings: Justice

‘Oh, what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what’ll you do now, my darling young one?
I’m a-goin’ back out ’fore the rain starts a-fallin’
I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
Where black is the colour, where none is the number
And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall’

‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ by Bob Dylan (Dylan)

Welcome to my wheel(s) of justice!

Hot on the heels of the Wheel of Fortune, Justice, the eleventh card in the Major Arcana, is another Tarot card concerned with karma, balance, and consequence. But where the Wheel asks us to recognise forces beyond our control, Justice turns the question back onto us. It asks us to think about the choices we’ve made, the ethics we live by, the power we have – and how we wield it. Life constantly asks us to decide, to weigh things up, to choose which path we want to take. And once we’ve made those choices, we don’t simply move on from them: they become part of who we are. That, in many ways, is the ‘justice’ of our lives: that we are what we’ve made ourselves. That we are shaped by what we have chosen, and by what we have been willing (or unwilling) to live with.

As Bakara Wintner writes in WTF Is Tarot?, Justice can be understood as a kind of personal code, our own little moral compass: “We feel Justice in our innate yearning for equilibrium, we call upon her to help us fight for something we believe in, we return to her when we have betrayed ourselves, we rely on her when we have strayed from our centre, and keep her counsel when faced with impossible choices.” When we achieve that kind of inner equilibrium, a strange freedom becomes possible: not the absence of constraint, but peace with the principles we have chosen to live by. As the philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”

“Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

As Charlie Claire Burgess explains, “if the Wheel of Fortune is about accepting change, Justice is about making it.” Justice is bound up with cause and effect: you did A, and it triggered a B response – not because the outcome was preordained, but because our choices shape what follows. And while I’m not a big fan of karma theory in its more cosmic or moralising forms, I do believe that life has a way of guiding us, and of restoring balance when balance is needed. True Justice, then, is not fate but accountability: having what we deserve, and recognising that no one can save us from her judgement but ourselves.

There is a proverb translated from the original Greek (Ὀψὲ θεῶν ἀλέουσι μύλοι, ἀλέουσι δὲ λεπτά) by George Herbert that goes “God’s mill grinds slow but sure.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow later shaped the same idea into poetry: “Though the mills of God grind slowly; Yet they grind exceeding small; / Though with patience He stands waiting, With exactness grinds He all.” Both capture something essential about Justice: a sense of righteous inevitability that tolerates no excuses. This is not a card of instant outcomes or dramatic reversals, but of consequences that arrive in their own time: precise and inescapable. The promise of the Justice card is this: that we will receive what we have earned. Good, bad, or indifferent: we all get ground in the great mill eventually.

The card isn’t just about justice being enacted on us though, it’s also about the control we have over the world around us. Our decisions don’t just affect us, they affect other people, and in small but cumulative ways, the universe itself. As Martin Luther King Jr. famously observed, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice” – but, as Eric Holder reminds us, “the arc bends towards justice, but it only bends towards justice because people pull it towards justice. It doesn’t happen on its own.”

‘It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul’

From ‘Invictus’ by William Ernest Henley

Justice often asks for honesty, and for the willingness to learn from lessons that may arrive with weighty consequences. It is a card of difficult choices, where the cost of truth can feel uncomfortably high. As Meg Jones Wall writes, in Justice “we are often observing the friction between the way we dream things could be, and the way they actually are. We use the sharpness of our mind, the wisdom of our spirit, and the empathy of our hearts to develop solutions to problems that may feel impossibly big – and through it all we rely on ourselves, trusting in our own personal moral compass and ethical analysis.”

In his excellent blog, Wayne Limberger cuts through a common question about Justice – “Is this a good card?” – with a bracing answer: “Not particularly, but it’s a necessary one.” Justice isn’t concerned with comfort or reassurance, whether we’re on the brink of success or facing defeat. Instead, it speaks to the social contracts we all quietly agree to live by: the rules, obligations, and expectations that structure collective life. If we honour them, we hope to be left alone; if we don’t, we hope – at the very least – that Justice might fall on our side in the dispute and we won’t be punished more harshly than we deserve. And while Lady Justice is often described as blind, Limberger suggests the opposite may be true in the Tarot: she may simply “see all too clearly for our liking.”

We are often told that we get the politicians we deserve. Perhaps, when Justice appears in a reading, we also receive the Justice card we deserve.

Symbolism in the Justice Card

In traditional Tarot decks, Justice is nearly always a ‘she’, despite the fact that historically most judges have been blokes (ah, lads, lads, lads!) The recurrence of the image of Justice as a woman suggests the card speaks to intuition and emotion* as much as cold action and outcome. (*Tarot is, of course, unapologetic in its use of masculine and feminine archetypes – a symbolic shorthand that is not without its issues(!), but which can still offer a powerful way of thinking about balance and relational dynamics, even when we resist reading those traits as biologically or socially fixed). Maddy Elruna writes that this suggests that to be right, something cannot be rigid. It must be capable of feeling its way through complexity: attentive, flexible, and alive to context. Read this way, the feminisation of Justice points not to sentimentality, but to the importance of empathy, compassion, and emotional intelligence alongside rules, outcomes, and verdicts.

The crown Justice often wears signals authority – but also responsibility. It represents the power of law, and judgement, reminding us that Justice does not act casually or whimsically. To wield justice is to carry weight: decisions made here have consequences that ripple outward. The crown elevates Justice as a noble force, but it also binds her to accountability. Authority, the card suggests, is not a privilege alone, but an obligation, one that demands integrity and care.

Rarely do the Major Arcana borrow from the suits of the Minor, yet Justice is almost never depicted without her sword. As in the suit of Swords, this blade represents rational insight, analysis, and the discerning mind. It is the tool that cuts through confusion, illusion, and self-deception – not to punish, necessarily, but to clarify. As Bakara Wintner asks, “What does it look like when we can have faith in the efficacy of our minds and the soundness of our judgement?” Her answer is simple: we arrive at Justice.

But the sword is not granted lightly. It is only once we have done the difficult work of reflection, honesty, and self-examination that come in the earlier cards of the Major Arcana that we are permitted to wield it. Justice’s blade allows us to shape our choices and our lives, yet, like most edgy things, it is also unforgiving. Justice pares things down until the scales are equal, and that process is not always comfortable. This is not a card of sentimentality or reassurance; Justice is rational, cool-headed, and resistant to crocodile tears or bribes. She is not just a judge, but a wise and battle-scarred warrior – she will not be tricked.

But, as Meg Jones Wall reminds us, while the sharpness of this card can appear to demand that we listen only to the rational mind, the opposite is often true: “by honouring what we know and observe, we can find more confidence in our instincts, intuition, and emotion, and work to make the world better for everyone rather than for the few.” Justice’s sword, then, is not about punishment, good or bad, right or wrong; it is about adjustment. And so the sword cuts both ways. Justice will find someone guilty even when that someone is us. At times it may also ‘cut us some slack,’ offering room for appeal – but only after the truth has been faced. This is why Justice remains, as Wintner puts it, “forever entwined with the sharpness of the Swords.” Incisive, unyielding, and at times harsh, but indispensable if balance is ever to be restored.

Unsurprisingly(!), Justice cards also nearly always contain imagery of the scales. Where the sword cuts, the scales weigh, reminding us that justice is less about instant verdicts than about consequence and proportion. As Jessica Dore frames it, Justice can be understood as a kind of “natural law that rewards the gentle and kind-hearted”: not a simplistic promise that “do good and good will follow,” but a way of solidifying the relationship between action and consequence. Add weight to one side of the scales and they will tip. Justice asks us to recognise how our actions – internal and external – inevitably alter the balance.

Again, this awareness extends to all aspects of our lives. As Maddy Elruna notes, “wise people are aware of both scales, of how they affect others, and how others affect them.” Dore takes this further, turning the scales inward:

“Justice teaches us that when we’re cold and rejecting towards the things in ourselves that we find grotesque and undesirable, that attitude yields consequences just as it would if we were to treat a friend that way: loss of trust, dignity, and personal power. On the other hand, when we practice kindness and willingness to engage with the parts of ourselves that we view as hideous or unlovable, we’re bound to receive a benediction”.

From ‘Tarot For Change’ by Jessica Dore

The scales also ask us to hold opposites in tension: inner and outer worlds, past and future, rationality and intuition, knowledge and lived experience. Justice is also one of the few Major Arcana cards with a direct zodiacal counterpart – Libra, the Scales (notably the only inanimate symbol of the zodiac!) Justice has that same remote quality at times – it’s a social construct rather than a physical force, it’s not as immediate as Leo’s lion or Virgo’s twins. Still, it’s powerful enough to shape lives, societies, and histories. Even though the scales are an object, in many ways they’re uniquely human, and uniquely humane. Something we made, not something we are. Justice is not an instinct like fear or hunger, but a principle we invent, negotiate, and uphold.

As Elruna puts it, “we are in a constant relationship with the universe… life is an ever-changing equilibrium as we move through it, continually adjusting who we are.” Rachel Pollack echoes this temporal dimension, reminding us that “we are formed by the actions we have taken in the past; we form our future selves by the actions we take now.” And, as Charlie Claire Burgess observes, Justice offers us a moment of agency: “here we have an opportunity to tip the scales.” To learn from the past, act in the present, and, with care, alter what comes next.

The pillars and the cloth behind Justice echo the visual language of the High Priestess, but with some important differences. The dominant purpley red of the veil is traditionally associated with wisdom and dignity, and again nudges us back toward reflection rather than action. Where the High Priestess sits between stark black and white pillars, Justice’s pillars are rendered in uniform grey. This is not mystery held in tension, but polarity already integrated (after all, black + white = grey!) As the eleventh card (11), Justice consolidates the duality of two (II), pointing us back toward the High Priestess’s trust in our guts in the face of things we don’t yet know, but now extending those qualities outward into the social world. As Meg Jones Wall suggests, the personal authenticity sought by the High Priestess becomes, in Justice, a collective ethical responsibility. Sometimes we might not know, outwardly, what is right. But we feel it, deep down in our bones. It’s that moral compass again, guiding us towards collective fairness over individual benefit.

Tarot also just really bloody loves these twin pillars (we see them not only in the High Priestess, but also the Hierophant, and, later, Death and the Moon). Their appearance here situates Justice between the High Priestess and the Hierophant, implying a middle path between inner truth and external authority. Since antiquity, paired pillars have marked thresholds – gateways into sacred or initiatory space – signalling passage rather than destination. Behind Justice’s veil we might imagine lies the same oceanic expanse glimpsed in the High Priestess: the unconscious, the universal, the larger moral field into which judgement must ultimately open. But unlike in the High Priestess card, Justice’s curtain is pulled tightly shut. Justice does not deny mystery, but neither does she dwell within it. She stands before it, tasked with not contemplation, but action.

This distinction helps explain why the High Priestess and Justice are often experienced so differently in readings. As Wayne Limberger observes, the High Priestess is usually read as a benevolent, or at least benign, presence, a guardian of knowledge who may simply withhold what we are not yet ready to receive. Justice, by contrast, is rarely neutral. She delivers outcomes rather than insights, and her verdicts depend not on sensitivity alone, but on whether we have lived in a way that can withstand scrutiny. Where the High Priestess says wait, Justice says account.

Symbolically, the pillars also gesture toward balance at a deeper level: birth and death, mercy and severity, intuition and structure. In Kabbalistic tradition, they are meant to be Jachin and Boaz, the pillars that formed the entrance to Solomon’s Temple (the first temple in Jerusalem), and also call to mind the two pillars of justice: mercy and severity. The pillar of mercy represents forgiveness for our wrongs. The pillar of severity represents the law of necessity – that we must reap what we sow (or, karma if you will!) Both are necessary for justice to be served. Without mercy, justice becomes cruel; without severity, it becomes ineffective.

Charlie Claire Burgess talks about morality as a seed of love and good inside all of us, that leads us to be kind and to help each other, even when it does not benefit us, even when no one is watching. This is the pillar of mercy. But alongside it, I think there is also a strong and distinctly human need for severity, particularly severity in the service of fairness.

One way to see Justice’s demand for both severity and fairness in action is through a well-studied behavioural experiment called the Ultimatum Game (hey, I’m a social scientist – I can’t help myself!) In this game, one player proposes how to split a sum of money and the other player can either accept the offer – in which case both players get their shares – or reject it, in which case neither player gets anything. Simple economic logic would predict that any non-zero offer should be accepted, since something is better than nothing. Surely rejecting a share of something in favour of nothing at all is cutting off your nose to spite your face? In practice, however, offers considered too unfair (typically those below roughly 30% of the total) are often rejected, even though rejection means the responder gets nothing; offers below about 20% are rejected at very high rates. What this suggests is striking: as a species we are willing to sacrifice material gain in order to punish unfairness. In moral terms, we value severity against injustice as much as we value cooperation, or mercy, or forgiveness. Interestingly, both participants in Ultimatum Game experiments seem to already know how things are likely to pan out. Proposers anticipate our innate sense of fairness and tend to offer around 40-50% of the pie in order to avoid rejection, much closer to an equitable split than pure self-interest would predict. This is a pattern that resonates with Justice’s sword and scales, where unflinching discernment must be tempered by a sense of proportion – and where fairness, not comfort, is the ultimate aim.

Esoteric traditions often suggest that when two forces (e.g. mercy and severity) are held in equilibrium, a third becomes possible – a mediating centre that represents human responsibility itself. Justice occupies that centre. She does not abolish opposites, but holds them in relationship, insisting that wisdom must be lived, not merely contemplated.

I’m also glad I trudged through Waite (of RWS fame) rambling on about his pillars though, because so many modern readings completely collapse the pillars of Justice and the High Priestess into a single symbolic shorthand. The visual parallel is interesting, and clearly intentional, but it’s equally striking how carefully Waite himself downplays the idea that they signify the same thing. For him, the resemblance is not an equation but a contrast: a shared form that opens onto fundamentally different worlds.

For Waite, Justice belongs to the moral world of action and consequence: a system where deeds can be weighed, responsibility assigned, and outcomes judged according to shared rules. The High Priestess, by contrast, guards a different order entirely, one of mystery, initiation, and – crucially – unearned insight. Waite suggests that some people are “called” – they have psychic abilities or are naturally talented artists – and others just… aren’t. There’s no merit system here; you can’t just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and graft your way into things like mystical insight or creative genius.  And when the gift is present, it isn’t bestowed because it has been earned. You either receive it or you don’t – and Justice has nothing to say about that. In Waite’s writings, the visual echo between the two cards is deliberate, but the worlds they open onto are not the same. As he neatly puts it, “the pillars of Justice open into one world and the pillars of the High Priestess into another.”

Blind Justice?: The role of the blindfold (or lack thereof!) in the Justice card

Traditionally, Justice in the Tarot does not wear a blindfold. As Rachel Pollack explains, “the psychic laws of Justice, by which we advance according to our ability to understand the past, depend on seeing the truth about ourselves and about life.” This, Pollack suggests, is why Tarot’s Justice remains unblindfolded, in contrast to her classical counterpart. Justice does not ask us to look away, from either our own behaviour or that of others. Instead, she invites us to see – to interrogate, “to stare bare-eyed into our past”, as Burgess writes, and reckon with our complicity, with the consequences of our action and inaction, and with the injustices from which we may still quietly profit. As James Baldwin once wrote, justice asks that we attempt “to tell as much of the truth as [we] can bear, and then a little more.

Historically, it is precisely against this visual tradition that Lady Justice’s blindfold first appears, and crucially, it does so in order to… well, take the piss. At the end of the fifteenth century, the earliest known representation of a blindfolded Lady Justice appears in a woodcut for Sebastian Brant’s Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools). Here, the blindfold is not a symbol of impartiality but a satirical critique: an indictment of judicial corruption, the abuse of trials, and the foolishness of endless legal quarrelling. Blindness, in this context, signifies wilful ignorance rather than fairness. Blind Justice is blind to injustice, not blind to status.

Yet, as the scholar Valérie Hayaert explains, over time Justice’s blindfold was increasingly reinterpreted as a positive emblem of impartiality: the ideal that justice should be administered without regard to wealth, power, or social rank. Seen this way, blindness comes to signify neutrality rather than ignorance. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that some Tarot decks lean into this later tradition, choosing to depict Justice as blindfolded.

Some decks go completely the other way, returning to the clear-sighted Justice of ye very olde days. I love the Lili White Tarot’s Justice, with the tattoo of the scales under her eye, almost as if she is weeping them. That image carries extra weight when read through the lens of Western tattoo symbolism: sorrow and loss, the marking of irreversible acts, even associations with having killed or served prison time – things that Justice may sometimes demand, at least metaphorically. The message is unsettling but powerful: justice is seen, felt, and borne.

I’m equally struck by Ana Tourian’s depiction of Justice, where the scales are reflected directly in her eyes. Again, the emphasis is on vision – not blindness, but clarity. Justice, in these images, is about seeing truly and choosing to align with fairness, truth, and balance, even when that choice is difficult. We may not always take the right path, but we recognise it when we see it. Your heart, quietly and insistently, tells you what is just.

Lucci’s Justice brings us back to the idea that the “justice” of our lives is that we are what we’ve made ourselves. I especially love the addition of the mirror here. It is Justice who allows us to hold up the mirror (the deep dark truthful mirror) to our lives and see what we’ve become. Not to condemn or excuse ourselves, but to recognise the shape our choices have taken.

Natural Justice: The Tarot’s Justice card as cause and effect

Both the Forager’s Daughter Tarot and the Witches Wisdom Tarot speak powerfully to the idea of natural justice. Here, justice is not moralised or sentimental, but ecological: the balance of nature, birth and death, reaping and sowing, hunting and nurturing, predator and prey. These decks remind us that justice is not always something imposed from above, but sometimes something that unfolds through cycles – often indifferent to human notions of fairness.

In Wild Card, Jennifer Cownie and Fiona Lensvelt describe Justice as an expression of the universe’s immutable laws. As they put it, “nature isn’t cold or cruel or unjust: it just is.” They point out that when we watch a wildlife documentary, we may root for predator or prey depending on the angle of the edit – but neither is truly hero nor villain. I use this anecdote a lot with my querents, and I point out that sometimes the lioness needs to bring down the gazelle, and sometimes the gazelle needs to get away. That’s balance, that’s the way of things. If the chase always favoured either the lion or the gazelle, the whole ecosystem would collapse. Sometimes, Justice reminds us, things simply happen: “And then the balance rights itself. And then the cycle goes on.”

I also love the ripples shown in the Spacious Tarot, a simple reminder that actions have consequences. You can think of Justice as a pebble thrown into a lake, or of the swing of a pendulum. You set it in motion, and what must – and always will! – follow is that it swings back. Every action produces a counter-reaction, sometimes harmonious, sometimes not, but balance is always restored. This is the card of cause and effect: everything we do sends ripples outward, shaping both our own lives and the lives of others. That’s why Justice is, to me, one of the most important cards in the deck – it is always operating, whether we notice it or not. It’s also for this reason that I like the reframing of the Justice card in the Thoth Tarot as ‘Adjustment’. Speaking of which…

“Justice Is What Love Looks Like In Public“: The Justice card as a call to activism

Mmmhmmm. This may just be the sex scholar in me, but I also think it’s kinda inescapable that Adjustment’s tools here are drawn to be somewhat sexual – the phallic sword, and the, ahem, testicular scales. I don’t think our pal Al used the term ‘testes’ without knowing about the very clear double entendre here! Crucially, his reading is very different from Waite’s. Crowley’s Justice is a cosmic engine, not a court of law. Where Waite says: Justice belongs to the moral world, actions → consequences, and these consequences are human and bounded; Crowley says: Justice is the universe. Nothing escapes equilibrium. Judgment is continuous. There is no outside of the system. (Also, Crowley was really horny, hey?)

Reading charitably, though, this isn’t just Crowley making everything about sex or indulging a Freudian fantasy of domination, but an attempt to imagine Justice as an embodied, generative force rather than a cold, abstract concept. Writing on the Aeclectic Tarot website, Brujaja points out that while Justice is incarnated in the body, in the feminine, in the sensory world; it must also be implemented, and implementation requires will, motion, and force. Testicles are where seed is produced, which recasts the scales’ careful weighing not as passive balance but as a germinative process: justice as something that generates futures. The sword, phallic and discerning, cuts and executes the ruling.

Making Adjustment/Justice kinda erotic also makes sense when we think of it in the context of what the philosopher Cornel West meant when he said, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” In this fab blog post, Takin Williams helps contextualise West’s quote, and makes it really clear how it relates to elements of the Justice card. Justice as the public expression of love is meant to be physical, romantic, erotic even, but it’s NOT about sentimental kindness or sappy moon eyes, rather: love with ethical teeth. West’s core message is simple and unsettling: justice is never comfortable. Justice emerges only when societies replace selfishness and comfort with what he calls “unarmed truth” and “unapologetic love.” Unarmed truth is the courage to tell the truth even when it carries personal risk, exemplified by figures like Martin Luther King Jr., who asked activists if they had their “cemetery clothes” ready – a reminder that justice often demands sacrifice. Unapologetic love, meanwhile, refuses polite silence in the face of harm; it insists on naming uncomfortable realities (in West’s work, particularly the poverty, incarceration, and exploitation experienced by African Americans) precisely because ignoring them protects comfort rather than people. Justice, then, is not abstract fairness or legal neutrality, but love made visible in collective action: what love looks like when it leaves the private sphere and enters the world. And when Justice prevails, we are all Crowley’s ‘woman satisfied’. The orgasmic bliss of a fair society, lol!

Some Tarot decks lean hard into this, into the Justice card’s social dimension, reminding us that sometimes this card can come up when personal justice and social justice do not align, as an invitation to do the right thing, even if it’s ‘uncomfortable’. As Bakara Wintner notes, abolitionists, civil rights workers, and social justice activists are often guided by the Justice archetype precisely because it demands action in the face of unjust systems, not mere personal balance or inner peace. Cownie & Lensvelt say that when this card appears, “it’s a chance to ask if you can accept what’s happening – and, sometimes, whether you should.”

In the Delta Enduring and the Unveiled Tarot(s), Justice is understood as resistance. The Alleyman’s Tarot captures this with the provocation that “sometimes the best form of justice is a union, a baseball bat, or even a knife”: a refusal of the comforting fiction that justice is always gentle or restrained. History tells us otherwise.

Charlie Claire Burgess argues that this kind of justice is less “perfect” but more alive, guided not by a “floating God-mind, but by a beating heart”. Burgess writes of the “pulse of social justice movements, the drumbeats of protest, the slow but steady tempo of meaningful social change”. Justice, in this reading, refuses static or externally imposed morality. It asks us to continually test our ethical frameworks against lived experience, to adjust them when they fail, and to accept that fairness is something practiced, not solved. As James Baldwin reminds us, “morality, if it is to remain or become morality, must be perpetually examined, cracked, changed, made new.”

There’s the same vibe to one of my favourite ever Justice cards, from Eric Maille’s Ink Witch Tarot. The creator loosely based the card on Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” and I love how this kind of callback shows how timeless and deeply vested in human experience(s) the Tarot is. Every time I look at this card I just hear “no justice, no peace” chanting over and over in my head. This brings me full circle to the Eric Holder riff on the MLK Jr quotation I referenced at the top of this blog post: “the arc [of the moral universe] bends toward justice, but it only bends toward justice because people pull it towards justice. It doesn’t happen on its own”.

For me this card clearly shows that Justice may be a natural law, but it’s also a very human struggle. If we want a fairer world we have to get off our arses, get out there and make it happen: Knights of the Round Table style 😉 Justice may be about balance, but that does not mean she supports sitting on the fence!

Human beings suffer.
They torture one another.
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured…

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles.
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing,
The utter self revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
And lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

‘The Cure of Troy’ by Seamus Heaney

Justice and Healing: What can this card mean in our day to day lives?

Jessica Dore points out that we often misunderstand Justice entirely. We tend to reach for it when we want to talk about punishment, vengeance, or retribution, “rarely imagining it as having to do with healing and restoration.” But Justice does not have to be carceral to be meaningful. It can be reparative. Restorative. Healing.

That’s why I love the depiction of Justice as couples counselling in Ethony’s Modern Love Tarot and as ‘Accountability’ in the Liberation Tarot. In my day job as a criminology lecturer – and particularly in my work with survivors of sexual violence – I see the distinction between punishment and reparation play out again and again. For many victims, “justice” is not primarily about punishment or revenge. It’s about restoring balance: being listened to, being believed, having the harm acknowledged, reparations made, and responsibility taken. The blunt, binary logic of the criminal justice system, with its insistence on absolutes, black and white – guilty or not guilty – often fails to deliver this, and can sometimes deepen the harm instead.

As an aside, I really have an axe to grind about this btw. Our adversarial justice (“justice”) system in the UK means that in a rape case, the defendant is pretty much instructed by their legal team not to apologise. Not to take any accountability. Not to reflect, not to reconsider their own actions, not to acknowledge the possibility to harm, even if unintentionally caused. Not to say: “OK, I thought at the time the encounter was consensual, but looking back on it now, and having listened to the victim, I can see how I might have been mistaken”. Instead they’re generally advised by their counsel to discredit the victim at all costs, to make them look delusional at best, or like an outright liar at worst. There’s then a related assumption among the media and the general public that if an offender is found not guilty this means that the victim is guilty – they’re a time-waster, an evil man-hater, a perjurer. I dream of an alternative system (not a replacement for criminal law, but an alternative route) where those who wish to do so can pursue a form of justice centred on acknowledgement, accountability, and repair. Not punishment for its own sake, but the possibility of restoring balance where harm has been done, intentionally or not.

Similarly, counselling is not about assigning blame so much as about repair: renewing trust where possible, rebalancing what has been thrown out of alignment, and rebuilding something liveable in the aftermath of harm. Seen this way, Justice is not a gavel or a sentence, but a process: attentive and relational. Not punishment for its own sake, but the slow work of making things right again. Of adjusting.

The Cosmic Cycles Tarot shows us that even within formal legal systems, Justice sometimes operates this way. As Thirteen observes on the Aeclectic Tarot website, many judges don’t simply dictate what must be done to correct an imbalance. Instead, they ask the parties involved to articulate it themselves: to show that they understand, not just intellectually but ethically, what has gone wrong and what needs to be brought back into alignment. The role of the judge, here, is not to hand down insight, but to create the conditions in which harm can be recognised, and healed.

Pulled in a reading, Justice reminds us that fairness is not always about outcomes, but about process: being seen, being heard, and taking responsibility for what has been done. It asks us not just to accept the world as it is, but to participate – thoughtfully and courageously – in setting it right.

‘Justice Moves’: Justice as a Balancing Act

Justice in Tarot, just like irl, is a balancing act, a philosophical tightrope walk between accountability and compassion, principle and pragmatism, aspiration and reality. It asks us to hold competing truths at once, to weigh harm and intention, mercy and severity, without pretending that any of this is simple or static.

That’s why I love Arozear’s playful depiction of Justice in the Curious Travels Tarot. Here, Justice walks a tightrope, arms outstretched, attempting to balance stark black-and-white weights while the sword of truth hangs precariously above her. The image is quietly instructive: situations are rarely as clean or binary as we’d like them to be, and equilibrium is something we work at, not something we achieve once and for all.

Like the dancer on Miller’s card, Justice’s balance is not a fixed pose but a continuous process of small, constant muscle adjustments. As Charlie Claire Burgess puts it, Justice is “an unceasing process of change, adjustment, and adaptability.” She is not a statue frozen in perfect symmetry, because balance itself requires movement. Justice does not stand still: “Justice moves.“

You Reap What You Sow… Or Do You?: Shadow work with the Justice card

Justice offers a lot of opportunity for shadow work, firstly because there is so much injustice in the world, and secondly because, especially if we’re using Tarot for introspection, we are rarely fair to ourselves. Either we let ourselves off the hook far too easily, or we pick, pick, pick (like the vultures in Guay’s card) punishing ourselves far more harshly than external adjudicator ever would.

Sara Kathleen’s A Grieving Tarot tackles this head on by grappling with the injustice of grief itself – the terrible, senseless unfairness of loss: “Good people suffer, and there is no real fairness here”. How small and pathetic the scales of Justice seem in her card. Because there is nothing that feels ‘just’ about this kind of loss, about losing someone so dear to our heart and integral to our health and happiness. No accounting can balance that kind of absence.

Or can it? In his searing memoir written in the shadow of his wife’s death, the author Julian Barnes reflects on grief “the thing is – nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think. If it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t matter.” Pain, here, is not justice restored – but it is proportion. A measure of love given weight.

And even in Kathleen’s bleak and tender image, the morning sun rises in the distance. Balance, of a kind, will return. We will know happiness again, even if sorrow never entirely leaves us. As the poet Sheenagh Pugh writes, “The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow / that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.”

In the Nigredo Tarot, Crusca depicts Justice almost like an autopsy scene, with a heart balanced against a brain – an image that feels particularly resonant when we think about Justice as shadow work. It captures the danger of tipping too far in either direction: of over-intellectualising our experiences until feeling is dismissed, or of being so emotionally immersed that perspective is lost. Justice asks us to weigh both with care.

In the (always fabulously unsettling) Cursed Auguries Tarot, Justice is shown as an anatomically correct heart, removed and waiting to be examined. Justice here is not abstract principle but visceral reckoning. A heart prepared for autopsy suggests truth after harm: not the heart as a symbol of love, but the heart as evidence; forensic. This is Justice that asks what actually happened to the body?, what damage was done?, what can be proven? It’s about reckoning after the fact. It says:

This is what happened. This is what it did. Look.

And the pins – Justice isn’t weighing abstractions here, she’s counting injuries; each pin marks a consequence. The thorny brambles round the outside of the card feel like containment and warning. Justice protects the truth by making it painful to approach. You don’t get to touch this reckoning without being scratched.

For me, the shadow work of the Justice card can tie back into the difficult work of restorative justice I spoke about earlier. Before repair, before balance, before forgiveness or severity, the wound has to be seen. Justice here is the moment when the pain we often feel in our hearts about the injustice we see in the world is finally taken seriously – not idealised, not weaponised, not ignored.

Hearts & Feathers: Anubis and Justice

Many (literally, SO many!) Tarot decks link their Justice card directly to Ma’at, the ancient Egyptian principle of truth and cosmic balance. It’s a framework that appears again and again in Justice imagery, often alongside Anubis (also beloved of many Judgement cards!), the jackal-headed psychopomp who guided souls through the afterlife and oversaw their reckoning. In the Hall of Judgement, Anubis would weigh the heart of the deceased against Ma’at’s feather: only a heart in balance, unburdened by wrongdoing, could pass on to the afterlife. A heart that proved heavier than the feather met a far grimmer fate, devoured by Ammit, the monstrous embodiment of divine consequence. Justice, in this mythic register, is not about human law or moral tidiness, but about alignment: the quiet, terrifying question of whether a life has been lived in harmony with the order of the world.

To really understand this mythic framing of Justice, we have to begin with what the heart meant to the ancient Egyptians. The ib was not simply the seat of emotion, but of thought, intention, and will – the core of a person’s ethical and spiritual life. In this context, the question isn’t whether the heart is good or bad, but whether it is light enough to balance against Ma’at’s feather. Did we learn from the ‘bad’ things we did, did we learn to adjust, to make amends, to aim higher, towards ‘good’? Or did we let the weight of our wrongdoings define us, pull us down into a life unexamined.

One of my favourite modern retellings of the Anubis myth appears in the first season of American Gods (a truly astonishing season – shame it couldn’t quite sustain that brilliance!) We’re introduced to Mrs Fadil, a character we haven’t met before and yet come to know so intimately in seven short minutes. She dies peacefully, in the middle of preparing supper for her family, and we see Anubis come to collect her and take her to the afterlife.

In the Hall (sands?) of Judgement, Anubis snatches out her heart to weigh it on his scales. Mrs Fadil jokes, slightly nervously, “Hey, I was using that!” To which Anubis replies, “We shall see if you have used it well.” We see the worry cross her face, as she thinks of all the small acts of cruelty she has enacted on others over her lifetime, the times she was petty, or thoughtless, or mean-spirited, the times she turned her face away when others needed her, or asked for her help, her charity. The kinds of everyday meanness we all recognise in ourselves. She stumbles in her haste to explain, to excuse: “I was unkind to the first boy who loved me. I stole a doll once from my cousin. I… I tried my best.” And then, as the scales finally settle, showing her heart to be fractionally lighter, Anubis looks at her and says simply: “Your best is good.”

Real Justice doesn’t ask us to be perfect, all the time. But it does ask us, always, to do our best.

As Ravenest notes on the Aeclectic Tarot site, the feather itself is a really on-the-nose bit of symbolism: feathers can be thought of as evolutionary transformations of scales – armour, protection – into the mechanism of flight. What weighs the heart down, then, are the things that impede movement: unexamined patterns, attachments, refusals to see, failures to adjust. A light heart is not necessarily an ‘innocent’ one, but one capable of lift – able to move freely, to change course, to fly on.

A heavy heart, by contrast, is not damned so much as stuck. Ravenest suggests that when the heart cannot rise, it must return to “do whatever it was” again – whether that return takes the form of repetition, cycles, or something closer to a rising spiral, depends on our willingness to learn. Justice, in a Tarot reading, might not be about winning or losing a moral contest, but about recognising what needs to be recalibrated so that movement becomes possible again.

This is why many Tarot enthusiasts prefer Crowley’s title for the card: Adjustment. Rather than leaping straight to punishment, guilt, or self-condemnation – and risking a lot of blurring of meaning with the Judgement card, which I def suffered from when I first started learning Tarot! – Justice asks us to look carefully at what is out of balance. Not what sentence is deserved, but what needs to change. In shadow work especially, this shift matters. Making an adjustment – finding a new way of being, thinking, or acting – is often far more just, and far more transformative, than any verdict we might hand down against ourselves.

This is a brilliant Justice to end on: embodied, political, compassionate, and quietly ferocious. It feels like the right note: not abstract hope, but earned insistence. And I know I’ve quoted a bit of it already, but I want to return to Invictus again, as for me, it is the Justice poem:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

‘Invictus’ by William Ernest Henley

Justice FAQs

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Works Cited

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