Talk:The World (tarot card)

Unverifiable and unbalanced content
The article is just personal opinions from an occult enthusiast about the nature and meaning of a particular tarot card. No peer reviewed books or journal articles are cited. No references or footnotes are given. When a new statement is added, the source needs to be cited, and the source needs to be verifiable, and reliable. Waite is not an unbiased, factual source on the history or evolution of tarot cards. The work can be cited properly, however: "Waite's opinion in his book The Pictorial Key to the Tarot ... etc" The other sources are definitely of questionable academic weight.

The card in question has a history of over 500 years in European card games in which it is used as trump card (see Tarocchi). The article is unbalanced in that it only features the recent uses of the card for divination. This makes the article biased due to its recentism. Since the article ignores use of the card for game play in Europe and other parts of the world, it offers an anglo-american perspective that raises NPOV issues. There are academic sources and sources from international organizations discussing the history and evolution of the "World" card as well as its use in games. Such sources need to be utilized. - Parsa 08:02, 23 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Here is why I disagree: despite any gaming heritage, the modern use of the tarot cards is clearly an occult phenomenon. People make their living reading fortunes off them, but the gaming aspect is all but non-exsistant in an current context.  While I will certainly agree that the body of many tarot articles needs substantial improvement, I think pretending their signifigance is not occult (at least so far as the average encyclopedia reader is concerned) is detrimental over-all.  (Copied from Talk:Knight of Swords (Tarot card))  --mordicai. 05:59, 19 March 2007 (UTC)


 * This seems an almost hollywood-like view on the subject.

If we do not include everything about a subject, we are not viewing it with a NPOV. Highcount. 11:58, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

The gaming aspect is anything but non-existant. This is where you are wrong. Tarot cards games are still currently played and there are currently efforts to have these games imported outside Europe. The occult signifigance of tarot cards lies only in the minds of occultists and those who take what they claim at face value.Smiloid 02:14, 20 March 2007 (UTC) The occult is not the only modern use of tarot cardsSmiloid 02:16, 20 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Add the sections then. Put a line in explaining that there is a gaming use, then go off, research some and write a proper article on the subject. Rushing about putting NPOV onto one line stub pages just makes the system look daft. It's very hard to see how a page like 'The three of Wands is a Tarot card' expresses any opinion, neutral or not, and the stub status already points out that the article is incomplete.--Nickpheas 07:40, 31 May 2007 (UTC)


 * I agree that adding information on the occult uses of the cards is entirely relevant to their modern usage and should be included. If you ask anybody about Tarot, they are more likely to know if it's occult uses than the fact that it was a game first. It is NPOV to disregard how the Tarot has developed over the years. This is most certainly not a very recent development, it is at least a couple of hundred years old now. If the divinatory meanings need to be prefaced with a statement to declare that it is only an occult perspective and not widely accepted, that should still be enough to include more detail on the occult meanings of the cards. Many other occult-related topics go into detail of theories and ideas that are not widely accepted, but we should still display an accurate spectrum of all views, substantiated or not. I agree that Waite's Pictorial Key should be used as the primary source for citations as it is Waite who popularised the modern occult usage of the cards. Zephret 11:38, 13 November 2007 (UTC)


 * I don't find it to be NPOV that the majority of the wordcount for these single-card articles focuses on the occult. Certainly it should be acknowledged that the cards are used in card games, and the current text of the article does mention that, and does mention that it's only in the English-speaking world that they're thought of as divinatory. But beyond that, there's not much to say about them in a card-game context. Pretty much all you need to know is what's printed right on the card; its suit and its number. However, in a divinatory context, hundreds of collective pages have been written about each of these cards, spread out in a paragraph or two about each card in each of the many Tarot interpretation books out there. I'm currently trying to write an open-source tarot card reading program, and I can't find any good, concise, open-source listing of divinatory meanings of each of the cards. I would find it extremely useful if Wikipedia provided that resource. Of course, it should be properly cited, to show who said what each card means, and what book they said it in. --76.200.139.66 (talk) 04:06, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

I hate to revive such an ancient discussion, but Waite did not subscribe to the divinatory meanings of the cards and included them in his book mostly as a sop for those who did. Waite's interest in the Tarot was always in a psychosexual and alchemical context, which is noticeable both in statements he makes and in the alchemical symbolism used in the cards. It is a peculiar feature of these Tarot articles that they seem to entirely miss this point. Kramden (talk) 21:24, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Copy edit
I made some copy editing changes, but I forgot to sign in, so they appear anonymous. I did change a little bit of the phrasing to make what I think are clear changes. I looked up basilisk, and no common definition calls it a snake, so I changed it to the more generic reptile. I tried to make this clearer to the average reader. Kkuchenb (talk) 02:40, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

I made some further copy editing changes, and changed the title of the trivia section (discouraged by Wikipedia) to The World Card in Popular Culture because the items have to do with computer games and a manga comic. I also deleted the last item, which was an unsubstantiated claim about tarot in general, not the World card. That info should be included on the tarot page.Kkuchenb (talk) 03:10, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Robert M. Place
The book "The Tarot" by Robert M. Place is referenced twice but there is no such book.

Robert M. Place has a few books which contain the words "The Tarot" somewhere in the title, but no single book called just "The Tarot", so it's not clear what is actually being referenced here. 139.138.69.196 (talk) 03:23, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

New information added: from Greek Mythology Tarot Cards
Hello, I am new to editing Wikipedia. The information I would like to add is from a book called "The New Mythic Tarot" by Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene.

This is the information I want to add: "On an inner level, the image of the woman (Hermaphroditus in Greek Mythology) is to show wholeness unrelated to sexual identification but rather of combined male and female energy, and to show an integration of opposites that arise in the personality charged by both energies. Opposite qualities between male and female that create turmoil in our life are joined in this card, and the image of becoming whole is an ideal goal, not something that can be possessed rather than achieved".

I want to add this information because I have a tarot deck and booklet that uses Greek Mythology to explain the meaning of the cards. The World is a card that I really resonate with, and for this reason I would like to add something from a bit of a different interpretation of what The World means (coming from a lens of Greek Mythology) to add to what is written on this Wiki page and enhance it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Vickisorin (talk • contribs) 20:16, 23 April 2022 (UTC)

Correction needed. Aquarius is NOT an air sign. It's a water sign. Also the Eagle should be the AIR symbol 2600:1700:977F:E810:D896:A31C:CF35:7A2A (talk) 21:52, 3 November 2023 (UTC)