Last year my Tarot Year Card was Key10 the Wheel of Fortune, and it definitely ended up being a year that turned my life upside down. There was a big part of last year that was, for me, the worst I had ever experienced. There was also a house move and a shake-up in our working lives. After all that we are now mostly settled and in a better place, both physically and emotionally.
This year according to the book Archetypal Tarot by Mary K. Greer, my Tarot Year Card is Key11, which for the Marseille and Thoth is Force and Lust. These would equal the Strength card in the RWS however the RWS has Justice not Strength at Key11, as it switched these two. Even after reading the entries for these card positions in Archetypal Tarot I am not sure which card should be this years card. So I guess I will re-evaluate at the end of the year to see whether this turns out to be a Strength or Justice year for me.
This years card was found using the formula below, you add your birth day, birth month and current year together, then add the numbers from that sum together until you end up with the highest number under 23, with the number 22 representing The Fool.
Hopefully this example given should help to clarify this.
month of birth 8
dayof birth + 26
current year + 2014
total 2048
The total number is then added together to give your year card, 2 + 0 + 4 + 8 = 14 (Temperance)
Some interesting notes in Archetypal Tarot talk about the positioning of Strength and Justice historically with one source speculating that these cards at one time were the one card, as both represent the two aspects of a single power. That power being Law, with Strength as the natural law of nature and Justice as society's law. Even S. L. MacGregor Mathers talks about Strength as "power not arrested" and Justice as "Strength and Force, but arrested, as in the act of Judgement".
Other sources also note the similarities of these cards with a Golden Dawn cipher manuscript describing the astrological correlation's of Justice as Leo and Strength as Libra. This was due to the sword of Justice being linked to the Egyptian knife symbol of the sickle of Leo and the scales as showing the Sun from the point of the summer solstice. For the Strength card, the female and lion represented Venus, Lady of Libra and the fire of Vulcan, which is Saturn in Libra.
However another part of this same cipher manuscript stated the Lion Goddess, being Strength, was related to Leo and the goddess Ma'at with her scales, being Justice, related to Libra. Showing that I am not the only one to be somewhat unsure of the placement of these two cards in the positions of Key8 and Key11.
