Pillar

What this is

A single standing pillar, set at the head of the twentieth folio. It is the emblem of strength that bears weight, of the support on which a structure rests, and of steadfast endurance. Its verses speak of stability, reliance, and the firm thing that holds the rest up.

What it governs

Presides over strength, support, stability, and steadfast endurance. Folio 20. It rules the upright thing that carries the load and the dependable person others lean on.

Its properties

Its colour is the white and grey of dressed stone; its number twenty; its form the column standing true. The quality is reliability, the strength to bear weight without complaint or collapse. In shadow it is rigidity, the pillar that will not yield and so cracks under strain, support given until the supporter is hollowed out.

Where else it appears

The same note is the two pillars that flank the temple porch, strength and establishment named on either side of the door; the pillar of cloud and fire that guided the wanderers; the central pillar of the Tree along which the soul ascends; the column the philosophers made the very figure of constancy. One pillar, many temples it holds upright.

Where you meet it on the Oracle

It surfaces as the Folio of the Day and as a closing folio, and it is the natural folio for questions of strength, of support, and of whether a thing or a person will hold. When it heads your day, be the steady one and lean on the steady ones; the day rewards reliability over showy effort. In a reading it answers that the structure will hold and counsels you to be the pillar where you are needed.

Why it matters

It stands twentieth because every life rests on a few load-bearing things, and the Pillar is the oracle's emblem of what holds the rest up. It asks you to be dependable and to know which supports you can truly lean on.

Correspondences

planet

Saturn, Sun

element

Earth

number

20

colour

Stone-white, grey

tarot

The High Priestess