8. (Climate) Justice
Tarot de Marseille by Grimaud, Paul Marteau
Lady Justice holds the scales. In the RWS, they are perfectly in balance. In the Marseille, they are tipped slightly in one direction; her elbow might even be doing the nudging!
At this moment in time, Justice in the context of Nature brings the term Climate Justice directly to my mind. How could it not, with this mess that we are in?
In the Waite-Smith Tarot, we see what Nature needs to function: perfect balance. In the Marseille, Lady Justice seems to be the voice of Nature, showing us how out-of-kilter things are by nudging the scales with her elbow. She is Nature as it is right now. Perhaps, from another angle, she even represents us humans, deliberately knocking things out of balance so that we can have more of everything; more plastic, more travel, more meat, more gadgets, always more.
The term Climate Justice points to something really important – the fact that many nations and peoples who have caused the least damage to the Earth might actually suffer the worst effects of climate change. For the time being (although not for much longer) it is relatively easy for people in certain rich, western cities to turn a blind eye to what is happening. But for someone living in a small, hot, island nation in the middle of the ocean, watching their land slowly sinking each year, watching the sea coming for their homes, it’s a different matter.
Justice from Tarots of the Golden Dawn, a 1990s Faery deck.
I notice an interesting thing happening to me as I write this: a sense of feeling sanctimonious, as if I am lecturing. The little white man, in his cottage in a cold country, waiting to get into his car to drive to work in the city. I recognise both my guilt and my hypocrisy; I damage the planet in all sorts of ways, by doing things that I really don’t have to do. I will let the Death card speak to this more in a later post, but when I say that ‘we’ need to do better, I very much include myself in that.
On the other hand, certain things needed to happen on the political level yesterday which I also feel powerless to control. I recall Lady Justice with her scales and I now see a smug politician holding all of the power and yet refusing to do a thing about it. Making things worse for cheap votes. Tarot cards always have light and shadow.
Justice from the Waite-Smith Tarot. She’s number 11 in the later systems of Tarot, but I prefer her at good old number eight :)
Do you remember early on in this blog, when I said that 74 of the 78 cards in both the Waite-Smith and the Marseille feature Nature symbolism? Well, in the Waite-Smith deck, Justice is one of the four cards that doesn’t feature any obvious Nature symbolism. We are being asked to focus on the human world. It’s easy to split the climate change issue into ‘humans versus other living creatures’ but the fact is that humans will suffer enormously because of climate change. I’ll no doubt write this a million times as this blog progresses (and I probably have already): we are Nature too.
I don’t have the answers, my friends. But our politicians do. They’re just avoiding them. So maybe if Justice shows up in a reading about Nature, she might be nudging you in that direction. Who is putting pressure on the world’s governments to find balance and justice? Can we somehow lend them a helping hand? Politics isn’t my thing, and it might not be yours, and that’s fine. But maybe there’s a way; I honestly believe that true love and care for Nature ripples out and makes a difference in ways that we can never measure.
That’s all for now, friends. You can scroll further down for last week’s post about The Chariot – and thank you for being here! You can sign up for the Tarot Blog newsletter (different to my main newsletter) below to receive email updates on every new post.
Smiles from Scotland,
Stephen
