What does The Universe mean reversed?

The Thoth Tarot is traditionally read without reversed cards: the reader judges from the cards around it whether a card is well or ill dignified. This is its ill-dignified or blocked reading: Something remains unfinished or too heavy; it needs to be completed before you begin anything else.

What are the Kabbalah and astrology correspondences of The Universe?

In the Golden Dawn system The Universe corresponds to the Hebrew letter Tau, path 32 of the Tree of Life between Yesod and Malkuth, the element Earth and Saturn/Earth in astrology.

Thoth Tarot · Major Arcana

The Universe

completion · wholeness · synthesis · fulfilment · the dance

A reflective starting point

What is The Universe asking you to look at?

Meaning changes with the position, the surrounding cards and your question. Take what follows as a language, not a verdict.

Read this card in a ritual Draw it from your own deck

Upright

Completion and integration: the cycle closes successfully and the next one is prepared.

At first sight

Completion, fulfilment, final success. It points to the end of a cycle, the reaching of a goal and sometimes to journeys or a widening of horizons.

Within you

The integrated wholeness of the person; the peace of someone who has given form to their potential and can recognise themselves as whole.

On the path

Path 32 from Yesod to Malkuth, the letter Tau (the cross, the seal, 400) and at once Saturn and Earth: the last path, where manifestation is completed and from which the return begins. The seal of the Great Work is also the door of the ascent.

The shadow

Ill-dignified, it signals stagnation, inertia, works left unfinished, Saturnine rigidity.

Reversed

In the Thoth tradition a reversed card is read through its dignity with the neighbouring cards; this is its shadow side.

Something remains unfinished or too heavy; it needs to be completed before you begin anything else.

In love, work and spirit

Love. A full, mature union, a sense of shared completeness; sometimes a bond that opens out to the world or to a journey together.

Work. Goals reached, projects concluded, recognition of a long path.

Spirit. The Great Work accomplished: matter revealed as the dance of spirit.

Correspondences

Tau ת · path 32 (Yesod – Malkuth) · Earth · Saturn/Earth

Crowley's note

Crowley's Universe is a maiden dancing with the serpent, turning the spiral of energy inside an ellipse of seventy-two sections; the Kerubim stand at the four corners, and at the centre the pattern of the elements.