Two coffins are floating in a sea of Fire, two corpses are reanimated: a man and a woman sit up and offer a baby to an Angel floating over them.
As the Fool is Elemental Air, the Hanged Man is Elemental Water; the Judgment Card is Elemental Fire. The Element purifies, burns off the unnecessary parts of the Self. Emotional turmoil, unneeded angst, prejudice, hate, fear, grudges and so on. What is left is the Self in its pure state.
The Ego represented by the man, sub consciousness by the woman; offers up their child: the culmination of life’s experience, knowledge, wisdom and compassion. The angelic figure above it is the Higher Self or the part of us that is eternal, the vehicle of the Spirit. Each part is an aspect of one’s being. The Man (ego) is quiet while the Woman (subconscious) is much more active: offering of the purified Self.
This Tarot Card is the Baptism of Fire. Attributed to Shin, the Hebrew letter interpenetrated as: Spirit, Judgment represents the incinerating of unusable values, habits, modes of expression and more. Judgment represents the complete destruction of a way of life, world views, opinions. Many have thought of the Last Judgment from the book of Revelations from Christian Mythology and rightly so. The experience is terrible if you have a tendency to cling to these things being taken from you. This is sometimes referred to as The Dark Night of the Soul where we face our self made demons and banish them. The experience is one of burning, loss and at times regret as we try to hold on to the past. Spirit is not all that concerned with the foibles of the flesh. Desires of the body tend to start and stop with the glands, Spirit is more concerned with the over all health of the entire being.
Unlike the book of Revelations, this does not happen at the end of time rather this is a constant process: perpetual intelligence. Through out our lives we discover tools and other helpful aspects of the flesh, however if we become too attached to these things, eventually the Spirit grows weary of the weight of the fetish and begins push it away. If we cling to the desire for dominance, accumulation of wealth and other things that tend to drag us down, the Spirit develops ways of ridding itself of these attachments. If we allow the Spirit to continually evolve, enjoy what is there and not be mesmerized by it, then we will be surrounded by Glory and yet it will have no claim on us. As Shin is at the core of this card, so too is one’s Spirit: the driving force of this continual cleansing of one’ life. Conflict is caused when the Ego clings to the parts being burned away.
In Judgment we learn the Tao.
The Judgment Amulet is the shape of the element of Fire, the triangle with the point up. Like the Lovers Amulet, it is framed in wings with male and female shapes representing the Ego and the Unconscious Self. The third shape is a Faceless Angel of the Higher Self: the continence is blurred to represent its transcendence. The Letter Shin is at the base of the amulet illustrating the source of cleansing.
The Judgment Amulet is a potent symbol of Spiritual Cleansing. People that would find this amulet useful in daily life would be Judges, arbitrators, housekeepers, and maintenance crews, gardeners, any whose task it is to clear, cleanse and renew environments, relationships and patterns of behavior. The Judgment Amulet is a potent symbol of Spiritual Purification. It may be worn by those that are going through upheaval in their lives, watching their positions being discarded, acquaintances being revealed as unhealthy and discarded; all this and keeping balance, knowing that this period on one’s life is to be harnessed as a positive and necessary thing.
Remember the giant Sequoia: The only way these great trees may survive as a species is for periodic fires to cleanse the land and stimulate their seeding.
Baptismal Fire
Amulets by Merlin's Blog 