The eight-pointed star
One great eight-pointed star shines over the Star card, with seven smaller ones around it. Waite names it l’étoile flamboyante, the blazing star of Masonic symbolism.
In the tradition
The blazing star hangs in the center of the floor of a Masonic lodge, read in the 18th century as a sign of divine providence or of the star that led the Magi. Waite was a Freemason and borrowed it openly.
The bird in the tree behind the kneeling woman is left unnamed by Waite. Many modern books call it an ibis, the bird of the Egyptian god Thoth, but that is a later reading.
Sources
- A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910). Waite's own guide to the deck he designed with Pamela Colman Smith, with each card's divinatory meanings.
Updated October 9, 2026.
See it in your own profile
Caelumia reads your whole birth chart and your numbers together, and shows where they agree. Your profile is free to start, and your first results appear while you answer.