The Star Tarot Card: Meaning, Symbolism, and Interpretation

Ask a room of tarot readers which card they're happiest to see and The Star will come up again and again. It is the card of hope, of healing after a hard time, of breathing out. That reputation is deserved, but it is also a little flat. The picture on the card is stranger and more specific than "hope", and its history includes a meaning that would surprise most modern readers.

This article is a companion to our encyclopedia page for The Star, which covers the card's meanings in love, work, feelings and yes-or-no questions. Here we slow down: what is actually drawn on the card, where it sits in the sequence of the Major Arcana, what A. E. Waite wrote about it, and how it behaves in real spreads.

Card seventeen, after the lightning

The Star is number seventeen among the Major cards, and its neighbors explain a great deal about it. Card XVI is The Tower: a tall building struck by lightning, its crown blown off, two figures falling. Card XVIII is The Moon: a dim path between two towers, a dog and a wolf howling, a crayfish crawling out of a pool.

The TowerThe StarThe Moon

Read as a sequence, the three cards describe something most people have lived through. First the collapse, sudden and loud. Then a quiet, open night in which you can see the sky again. Then the long, uncertain walk forward, when the clarity of the Star gives way to doubt and half-light. The Star is the pause between the shock and the journey. It is not the happy ending; it is the moment you realize you are still here.

That placement is why The Star rarely feels triumphant. It is gentle. Nothing in the card is being won or built. Water is simply being poured.

What is in the picture

Waite's own description of the Rider-Waite-Smith card, from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, is precise:

A great, radiant star of eight rays, surrounded by seven lesser stars — also of eight rays. The female figure in the foreground is entirely naked. Her left knee is on the land and her right foot upon the water. She pours Water of Life from two great ewers, irrigating sea and land.

Each of those details is worth a moment.

The stars. One large star and seven smaller ones, all with eight points. Seven is a number that turns up across many traditions (seven planets known in the ancient world, seven days of the week), and readers have connected these stars to all of them. Waite, for his part, called the great star "fantastically the Star of the Magi" and left the arithmetic alone. The simplest reading is also the most useful: many small lights around one guiding one, enough to navigate by.

One knee on land, one foot on water. The figure is balanced between the practical world and the emotional one, between the solid and the flowing. She is not wading in, and she is not standing apart.

Two vessels, two streams. One jug pours into the pool, one onto the earth, where the water divides into five small streams. Many readers take the five streams as the five senses: the renewal is not abstract, it reaches the body.

Her nakedness. After The Tower strips everything away, there is nothing left to hide. The figure is not exposed so much as unguarded. This is one of the reasons The Star is read as honesty and openness as well as hope.

The bird in the tree. Behind her, a bird has landed on a tree. Waite simply calls it a bird; many later readers identify it as an ibis, the bird associated with the Egyptian god Thoth, though Waite does not say so. In an earlier chapter of the same book, he notes that on some later versions of the older cards a butterfly on a rose takes the bird's place.

Waite's surprising divinatory meaning

Here is a part many guides skip. In the section of his book listing divinatory meanings, the short meanings a reader would use at the table, Waite gave The Star this:

Loss, theft, privation, abandonment; another reading says — hope and bright prospects.

And for the card reversed: "Arrogance, haughtiness, impotence."

Hope appears only as a second opinion. Historians of tarot trace lists like this back to the French fortune-telling tradition that began with Etteilla in the late eighteenth century, which often paired cards with meanings that have little to do with their pictures. Hope itself was not new either. In his survey of older decks earlier in the book, Waite notes that "the Star has been called that of Hope".

Waite was not much impressed by any of this. In his description of the card he dismisses "the summary of several tawdry explanations" that makes it a card of hope, and suggests that most prepared minds will see in the figure "Truth unveiled". He then adds his own esoteric reading: in reality, he says, she is the Great Mother of the Kabbalah.

So three meanings sat side by side in 1911: an old fortune-teller's list of losses, a popular reading of hope, and Waite's mystical one. What settled the matter for most readers since is Pamela Colman Smith's picture. Her figure is so calm, and the night so clear, that hope is simply what people see. It shows that card meanings are not fixed, and that the picture often has the last word. If you sometimes feel that a card says something different to you than the book does, you are in good company.

The Star and Temperance

The Star has a close cousin in the Major Arcana. Temperance, card XIV, also shows a figure with one foot on land and one in water, also pouring between two vessels. The resemblance is hard to miss, and the differences are telling.

TemperanceThe Star

Temperance is about blending opposites with care. The Star is about generosity without calculation: the water is poured out freely, and the pool does not run dry.

In the Golden Dawn tradition

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the society Waite and Smith were both connected with, gave each Major card a Hebrew letter and an astrological sign, planet or element. For The Star, the sign is Aquarius, the water bearer, which suits the picture well, and the letter is Tzaddi. (Aleister Crowley, a later member, swapped Tzaddi to The Emperor in his own Thoth deck, which is why you may see different attributions elsewhere.) You can see how the other signs line up on our zodiac tarot cards page.

Reading The Star upright and reversed

Upright, The Star usually points to recovery after difficulty: the first easy breath after a long stretch of holding it. It can mean renewed faith in the future, a calmer relationship with yourself, or the return of something like inspiration. It tends to describe a state rather than an event. Things feel possible again.

Reversed, the card is often read as hope that has gone quiet: discouragement, self-doubt, or the sense that the good things are for other people. Some readers see a different reversal, in which the figure has stopped pouring and is holding on to everything. Either way, the reversed card rarely means hope is gone. More often it asks what has been blocking it.

In love and in work

In questions of the heart, The Star is a healing card. After a breakup it can describe the moment the grief softens; in a relationship it can show trust being rebuilt, or two people being honest with each other again. It is not usually a card of fireworks. It is closer to a long, kind conversation.

In work and decisions, The Star often appears when someone is reconnecting with why they wanted something in the first place. It favors the path that feels true over the one that looks impressive. It can also be a gentle warning against burning out: the figure pours, but she is also kneeling, resting, and the pool is full.

The Star in different positions

A card's meaning shifts with its position in a spread, and The Star is a good example.

• In the past position of a three-card spread, it can mean a recovery has already happened, something you might not have given yourself credit for.
• In the present, it describes the open, quiet moment itself: a good time to set intentions rather than rush.
• In the future, it suggests the direction is toward calm, if you keep going as you are.
• As advice, it often says: be honest, be generous, and let yourself be helped.
• In a "shadow" or "what you don't see" position, such as in our self-reflection spread, it may point to hope you haven't let yourself feel yet.

Questions to sit with

The Star is easy to love and easy to underestimate. It is not a promise that everything will be fine. It is a picture of what it feels like when, after a long time, you notice that you can breathe. For more, read the full Star card meaning, or draw it for yourself in the free reading.

Sources

• Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (William Rider & Son; published in 1910, dated 1911): the description of the card and its divinatory meanings, quoted above. The book is in the public domain; our card pages quote it in full for every card.
• Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis and Michael Dummett, A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot (Duckworth, 1996), on Etteilla and the French divinatory tradition.
• The Golden Dawn attributions follow the system used by the Order in the 1890s, as published in later accounts of its teachings; Crowley's change appears in his Book of Thoth (1944).