AUTHOR’S NOTE: File under “Fanciful and Farfetched Philosophical Finagling.” Forgive me for having a little fun with this one, but I just came across a remark in Paul Fenton-Smith’s Tarot Master-Class about the Star bringing “nurturing” that sent me down this path.

A great deal has been written about the fact that the woman in the Star is pouring water concurrently into a pool and onto the adjacent bank, the metaphysical implication being that the scenario is one of two minds, the Unconscious (the pool) and the Conscious (the bank), both of which receive equal largess in the form of spiritual blessing.

However, the meteorological reality is different: water evaporates upward from a body of water, forms storm clouds, precipitates onto the ground and flows back from whence it came. This seems like a more convincing paradigm for the card, with the woman harvesting water vapor from the surface of the pool, distilling it into droplets, and discharging it onto the bank in the form of nurturing rainfall, which eventually returns to the reservoir. Then the cycle repeats.

Although I’m too lazy to draw it, I can picture the naked woman with her back to the viewer, bending over a little farther than normal and collecting ethereal fluid in a jug with her left hand (which in occult theory is passively receptive), allowing that substance to percolate through her in order to purify and condense it, and releasing it from a second jug with her right hand (the “active”hand in common usage). In this way she mediates between the two rather than simply being a source of inspiration for both.

This makes the Unconscious more than an obliging recipient of her charity; it is a vital participant in the same way that it is at the heart of our psychic efforts to channel universal wisdom from “on high,” but it isn’t sequestered in the numinous realm of Spirit, it’s right here within reach and expects a return on its input. (I’m thinking along the line of the various “laws of conservation” in classical physics.)

The card thus becomes one not of hope but of certainty in the natural way of things. This makes it less remote and abstract than is the general rule, and in this sense I see it more as a “Water” card than an “Air” card. After all, its associated constellation is “The Water Bearer,” so the Star – with its two vessels – can be considered a close cousin of Temperance in that early astrologers viewed Jupiter (ruler of Sagittarius and therefore of Temperance) as a “watery” planet, to which the dual vases of the angel attest, and I once wrote an essay that described the “medium of exchange” as the Water of Spirit. Where Temperance conserves, the Star dispenses and the balance is restored later through recovery of what was bestowed.

Rather than trying to direct the flow of energy from above, in my retelling the woman’s higher nature accedes to the necessity of organic regeneration and chooses to step in and play a part as the conduit (and walking “Aqua-Pure” filter or reprise of the subconscious [Woman] interceding between the conscious [Man] and the superconscious [Angel] in the RWS Lovers card). I think I would display a cosmic lemniscate somewhere on the card to replace or augment the eight-pointed star, either above her head or intertwined with her hands, showing that the process is infinitely repeated as we’ve seen in the meteorological analogy. (This perpetuation is already implied by the long, sinuous tresses of the woman in the Thoth version.)

As a “baseline,” here is my 2019 essay on the subject.

https://parsifalswheeldivination.org/2019/08/31/temperance-the-star-and-the-water-of-spirit/