VIII · Justice

Justice is law. It concerns our personal morals and the ethics of society. It is also the way groups of people justify killing other (weaker) people. When someone is wounded and they have done something to offend society, they are at the mercy of Justice. In your life, consider who fits this category. Who's had a blow to their social standing and been weakened by this blow? Do people think they got what they deserved? Have you done something that would cause others to denigrate you? Or perhaps some injustice have been perpetrated upon you or your ingroup and you are ready to retaliate—to make sure the offenders come to Justice? In either case, put on the other girl's dress, and see things from her point of view.

Like the Fool, Justice is not placed in the same order across different decks—most frequently interchanged with Strength. In the Rider-Waite the VIII card is Strength not Justice, and in the Crowley-Harris Thoth deck, Justice is renamed as the Adjustment. Putting the Fool at both the beginning and the end of the Major Arcana makes sense since the Fool's journey is never really complete—since to be a person means to be a Fool, and to be a living person means being on a journey. So as long as you're a living person, the Fool is you. But why interchange Justice with Strength? Could it be because discipline requires Justice and punishment requires Strength? For what is Justice if it cannot be administered usually against the will of the unjust. This, of course, is the foundation of law, and the fact that Strength is so closely correlated with Justice in the Tarot, it is safe to assume that Justice in the Tarot, just as in life, is the representation of the law. Thus Justice is law becomes even more evident when we consider that of the four cardinal virtues represented in the Tarot, only three are given specific cards—Justice, Strength (fortitude), and Temperance—the fourth cardinal virtue, Prudence, is absent because it is combined with the Justice card.

Those who fail to take these risks are cowards—and nobody wants to be a coward, which is curious as it seems the most natural of responses to risk. Courage is such a weird concept, and is named neither as one of the four cardinal virtues, nor given a specific card in the Tarot, but Justice and Prudence frequently necessitate an act of courage, but then again Justice is often carried out on the part of the majority against the minority. From Shylock to Hester Prynne to OJ Simpson, whoever finds themselves at the mercy of Justice is not only subject to written law, but also the prejudice of the mob, whose sympathies have little to do with fairness and fairmindedness.

Surely the wronged have the right to Justice. Surely, many a crime has been prevented by the looming figure of the law—her scales and sword. Everyone has reasons for their actions and we can judge each person according to those reasons. Right? However, those reasons may even have little to do with her or who she is. And if you yourself are on the business end of the steely lady's sword, consider how you got here and whether you should defend your honor or capitulate to the crowd. Because Justice is always about the crowd, not even vigilante justice is ever the act of just one man, since the system of ethics that led him to perform the act is the product of centuries of law, millennia of society, and millions of years of evolution. Whether you are Hannah Arendt meditating on Eichmann or a Capuchin monkey who refuses to eat her cucumber, your sense of justice has been shaped by forces far greater than yourself. No one man can administer justice on their own. Although it is often a dish served to specific individuals, its preparation takes a team of cooks in a full kitchen. If Strength is water, Justice is wine. Justice is not natural. It is a complex, artificial process founded upon centuries of practice and heuristics, requiring the cooperation of large groups of people.

In the Tarot, Justice is both the most private and the most social of the cards. She is the ultimate judge of all our actions—the ethical mirror you hold up to your past.

The lancet fluke gets into an ant by way of a snail's slime, and the ant never learns the details. Dozens of flukes settle in its body. One of them, only one, moves to the front and touches the brain. From then on, when the evening cools, the ant climbs to the tip of a blade of grass and bites down and holds, waiting for a sheep. When the day warms, it lets go and walks back down to live like an ant, until the air cools again and it climbs back up to be sentenced. Justice as a daily commute.

Think about that front worm. It does the steering, and the whole crowd rides to the sheep on its work. It never builds the little shell the others hide in, so when the sheep digests the ant, the one that steered is, as far as anyone can tell, the one that doesn't survive. The others are often its clones. It dies so that copies of itself can arrive, which is either the purest altruism in nature or the most sensible selfishness, and Justice has never been able to tell the two apart. When Justice appears, ask where you are in this arrangement: the crowd, the one at the front, or the ant on the tip of the grass, holding on with all her strength to her own conviction.

As human beings, we have a pretty complicated relationship with the idea of justice, which is a gooey amalgam of our most personal sense of right and wrong and the most encompassing social ethics system we've created—namely the law. The idea of ethics and justice varies greatly from person to person, village to village, society to society, nation to nation, epoch to epoch. We are ready to kill the lowliest beggar and the greatest dictators in the name of justice—from code of Hammurabi to the Nuremberg Trials to Jim Crow, we create complicated moral systems to justify punishing and killing those we consider as having violated whatever hallowed code we subscribe to at the time.

In our own society, the Bible is literally associated with Justice. When a Supreme Court Justice swears their allegiance to the law, they do so on the Bible—our most hallowed text. What does this say about our concept Justice, when the book we intimately associate with the law contains the following statutes: Deuteronomy 25:11-12—"When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets: Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her." (The "secrets" here being genitals); Leviticus 19:19—"Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee"; Colossians 4:1 "Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven"; Leviticus 15:19-21—"And if a woman have an issue, and her issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be put apart seven days: and whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean until the even. And every thing that she lieth upon in her separation shall be unclean: every thing also that she sitteth upon shall be unclean. And whosoever toucheth her bed shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even" (i.e. people shouldn't sit in the same spot as a woman on her period). Numbers 5:11-31, "If a man's wife goes astray, and is unfaithful to him so that another man has sexual relations with her, and this is hidden from her husband... the priest shall take holy water in a clay jar; and put some dust from the tabernacle floor into the water ... then the priest...shall say to her... May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries" (i.e. dirty water causes abortions and adulteresses should drink a mixture of holy water and tabernacle floor dust); In a passage from Leviticus, there is a discussion about birds. Leviticus 11:13-19 states, "And these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the ospray, And the vulture, and the kite after his kind; Every raven after his kind; And the owl, and the night hawk, and the cuckow, and the hawk after his kind, And the little owl, and the cormorant, and the great owl, And the swan, and the pelican, and the gier eagle, And the stork, the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat" (i.e. don't eat owls. It's very specific: neither little owls, nor great owls shall ye eat); In Exodus 23:19, it states, "The first of the first fruits of thy land thou shalt bring into the house of the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk" (i.e. don't boil baby goats in milk); Exodus 21:5-6, the second book in the Old Testament, makes the following provision about how to treat an enslaved person: "And if the servant shall plainly say, I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free: Then his master shall bring him unto the judges; he shall also bring him to the door, or unto the door post; and his master shall bore his ear through with an aul; and he shall serve him for ever" (i.e. brand your slaves in a court of law); Leviticus 10:6 provides instructions about grief, offered through the words of Moses: "And Moses said unto Aaron, and unto Eleazar and unto Ithamar, his sons, Uncover not your heads, neither rend your clothes; lest ye die, and lest wrath come upon all the people: but let your brethren, the whole house of Israel, bewail the burning which the Lord hath kindled" (i.e. don't show grief, just accept the Lord's punishment).

Of course, the above constitute the tribal taboos of ancient shepherds. As Christians, perhaps the presidents and justices sworn in on the Bible are more particular to the wisdom of Jesus. Let us see how he measures up. In Luke 14:26 Jesus says, "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." Not only does Jesus demand that his disciples dedicate all their attention to him, but he's unwilling to let them share that attention with their families. To be fair, Jesus wasn't just a jerk to his friends, he could also be quite cruel to strangers, like when he called a hungry woman a dog: "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." But she came and knelt before him, saying, "Lord, help me." And he answered, "It is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs" (Matthew 15:24-26). Although, to be fair, he also expected his followers to be ready to starve: "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink" (Matthew 6:25).

Perhaps the most famous account is of Jesus when he literally flipped the tables of a bunch of vendors who were selling doves at the temple. "Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves " (Matthew 21:12-13). Doesn't seem much in line with the "turn the other cheek" and "love your enemies" guy.

But Jesus wasn't just a jerk to people, his enmity also extended to trees: "The next day as they were leaving Bethany, Jesus was hungry. Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs. Then he said to the tree, "May no one ever eat fruit from you again.'" That's right, Jesus was hungry, the fig tree had no fruit, and Jesus was so pissed he cursed the tree, and it died.

Of course, many Christians will point out that "Jesus Murders a Fig Tree" is a parable, an allegory that contains a deeper message or truth beyond "Fuck Fig Trees." The problem is that when Jesus spoke in parables, the Bible is pretty clearly about saying "So Jesus told us this parable" instead of "Jesus did this specific action that apparently we're supposed to figure out a deeper meaning from." Either way, it's not like Jesus spoke in parables in order to be understood. From Mark 4 "And when he was alone, they that were about him with the twelve asked of him the parable. And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them." If there is another interpretation of this other than Jesus essentially saying "I don't want to be too clear otherwise everyone will get into heaven" I would love to hear it. Maybe it's also a parable?

If you thought the fig tree had it bad, there was also the time Jesus murdered a herd of pigs in Matthew 8. So let's set the scene. A herd of pigs is hanging out, eating things, and basically just chilling. That is, until Jesus meets two men with demons in them, and the demons, being practical, ask to be sent into the pigs instead. Jesus says "Go." The whole herd runs down the bank into the sea and drowns. If you've just read the Chariot card, you know the plot: a passenger takes the wheel and drives its animal into the water. The Gospel calls it a miracle; the hairworm calls it Tuesday.

So yeah, the foundational text our society uses to officiate the executors of Justice is based on a set of tribal taboos and the teachings of a petulant egomaniac who not only thought of himself as God, but went around flipping tables, hurting plants and animals, and purposely making things confusing so that only his friends could get into heaven.

However, perhaps you're one of those who are inclined more toward natural law, such as Karma, and believe Justice is a kind of universal tit-for-tat ledger that keeps a balance of all your good and bad deeds. Nevertheless, the tabulation of these universals in the ledger still depends on your ideas of what exactly good and bad things are and your definition of a good act may be very different from that of some other person. No matter how universal you think these universals are, they will not overlap perfectly with those of other people, which makes these Karma ledgers incompatible. A good deed on your part may cause someone suffering and vice versa. And since your good deeds don't carry over to other people's ledgers and vice versa, Karma is at best an imperfect system of accounts.

Karma is a Sanskrit word for action, and in the traditions that gave it to us it's less a cosmic revenge service than a law of consequences that follows you from one life to the next. The lancet fluke would find this familiar: it lives in a snail, then an ant, then a sheep, and each rebirth is paid for by someone else.

And here they say that a person consists of desires,
and as is his desire, so is his will;
and as is his will, so is his deed;
and whatever deed he does, that he will reap.

— Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.4.5, trans. F. Max Müller, Sacred Books of the East 15 (1884)

When Justice appears in your reading, consider if you're Hester Prynne or Abigail Williams? Who around you are the executors of Justice? Do you agree with them? What about their approach to Justice? How about their approach to discipline and punishment? Are they themselves just? What would that even mean? In life, your happiness is directly affected by the people around you and their ideas of justice. Whatever your idea of justice may be, compare it to that of other people. The more consilience between different people's concept of Justice, the better their ability to cooperate and avoid conflict.

Is there a natural law that applies to all sapiens and even sentients? What do you consider to be a universal right and who around you are having that right violated? Are the animals living in industrial farms being treated justly? How about all the people suffering and dying because they are denied access to medicine? Is it just for you to be walking around with two perfectly good kidneys when you really only need one and thousands of people are slowly dying on dialysis?