Number 11 in the tarot: if it’s an RWS deck, everyone knows it’s Justice, the card of justice, of what’s right, and even of balance. If you look closely, where the RWS puts this card is quite special. When we lay out the Major cards from 1 to 21, card 11 sits exactly in the middle. It really lives up to its name as the card of balance.

But there’s one deck that orders them differently: the Thoth Tarot. Its card of balance isn’t number 11, it’s number 8. The man who created this deck (Aleister Crowley) had quite deep reasons for moving this card (and they make sense!!), and they tie in with a lot of other things. I’ll tell you about them in a later post.

But looked at from another angle, Thoth’s balance card at number 8 still has balance in it. For example, the number 8 is symmetrical in itself. Or, if we split the Major cards into three vertical columns, card 8 heads the second column, the middle one, and acts like the pivot of a pair of scales between the other two columns. You can see it this way too.

Besides this troublesome card 11, I’ve personally come across other problems to do with balance too, not only card 11. The examples below are just things I wonder about myself, from what I’ve studied and picked up.

The first is how the planets are assigned to the cards. If you put them in order (going by the RWS), you get:

• Mercury, Moon, Venus, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Saturn

But if the planets were assigned to the cards according to real astrology, the order of the planets should follow the Chaldean Order, which is:

• Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon

Then again, the planets were assigned partly from the pictures on the cards and from the Hebrew letters assigned to them too.

Another interesting one is the balance of good cards and bad cards. It may not be about the meanings as such, but about the mood of the cards. If you look carefully, you’ll see that Swords have quite a lot more negative meanings than the other suits.

There are many more conflicts and nagging problems I still wonder about. But I can’t quite say why cards that hide these conflicts are so charming, and why they make us feel they blend together and fit. Maybe these small conflicts are helping to balance the tarot.