The World is card XXI of the Tarot major arcana. It is depicted as a lovely nude woman dancing in a circle of foliage and flower. The Lion, Cherub, Eagle and Bull, representing the cardinal directions, four elements and the four fixed signs of the Zodiac, guard her corners. The World card is about having come full Cirlce, having arrived at one's full potential.

I theorize that the roots of the meaning of this card have origins that nary a Tarot card reader might know. Early Renaissance philosophers and magicians, Cornelius Agrippa being my main informer, developed a LOT of theory on the nature of the relationships between God and the manifest World. The basic idea is that "God" is an idea so rarified it does not translate into material existence. Material existence, with its woes and strifes and hungers, lusts, and satisfactions and disappointments, seems so distant from God as to not be related at all. But lo, they theorize that there is an entity, and agency (we would call it the Goddess) that is a feminine aspect of the Divine which translates the idea of God into what will code for manifest reality. This person is named by Agrippa and other alchemist/philosophers "The Soul of the World" and is depicted as a woman joyous about bringing the World into being. Remind you of anyone? Well I believe that the lady represented in The World card is none other than the Soul of the World. She who brings all things into being.

Now, how do we represent this most auspicious Goddess through potion? For all these years of my work, it involves glass dropper pipettes, which after measuring out their share of essential oils or oil blends, get put into a "dirty pipette" jar to be cleaned at a later time. I had long wondered why the resulting mixture, an accidental concoction, was always such a lovely scent! Originally it had been my idea to make this stuff into something called "The Everything of It All." But it wasn't until I started the Tarot line that I realized that what is in that jar is a little bit of everything, bright and dark, nuanced and crude. Always changing, like The World. You would think that this combination would be like mixing all the colors together and ending up with dark mud or black...but the opposite is true. In this scent it is like all the "colors" get recombined to produce white light.