The Archetype of Justice, the order of nature

“Measure of the Soul” oil on wood in upcycled frame

The responsibility of Justice is a heavy weight, a double sided sword, both of whose edges need consideration. I didn't visually personalize this card but it was personal. It was a very intimate pull for me. I was swept away in the depths of this archetype that goes so far back through history. She is countless statues in the courthouse, oil paintings, heiroglyphs, stories, and a force we intrinsically know. I have so many photos, both locally and internationally taken, of the symbol of Justice- almost always a woman, holding the scales of judgement and the two sided sword, and sometimes a scroll. I love this figure, beautiful, in marble. Before she appeared on your courthouse cornice she was our judicial lady, Justintia. She was a Roman Goddess blindfolded so she wouldn't be swayed by her own emotions and feelings, Friendship nor hate, by the face of her mother on the witness stand, or the devil in disguise. Oh, right, SHE was briefly Jesus (yes, with scales and sword) as well as the angel Michael, judging the souls of the people to determine their candidacy for heaven. But that was a rather short, uneffective attempt by the Christians to nudge her into their power. Before she was blindfolded she had been the Greek Goddess Dike, and before that, Dike's mother, Themis. Both held her scales, and judged the dead. Dike was the moral order, the law, and Justice (like Justitia). They stomped on evil snakes, or wrapped spiritual serpents around their arms, cuddled lions (Strength, anyone?) and poured out cornucopias, but all ladies were clearly this archetype. Themis existed before Zeus was born. She was his nursemaid and then wife and advisor, telling him how to make a universe (that's a crazy Maker Faire!). Themis, a Titan, was a prophesying Delphic Oracle. The Greeks found Themis in Egypt when she was Ma'at, and it is Ma'at I choose to portray in this painting, though she is dressed as Themis and holds the weapon of 16th century judiciary law.

Ma'at was the concept of order. She was the balance to chaos. Anubis, the jackal headed god, originally held the scales, but Ma'at WAS the scales, the balance. She was the order of nature. Her ostrich feather of truth was the weight used to judge the morality of the humans' heart, or better said, to judge if the human walked in balance with the laws of the universe. She determined if they would go peacefully to the underworld, or if their heart, all their ka, would be fed to the giant Nile crocodile. chomp chomp. I tried to find her further back in time, I can sense her there, in Africa, but I couldn't find her on the internet. She is in story and then she just IS, without word or definition. So the far background is the African shore of the Nile, stretching through the lands that Ma'at, Themis, Dike, Justitia, and Justice all flowed through, upstream through time

How can we live within the order of nature, the justice of the universe, when we are still figuring out what the laws of the universe are? How can we know Justice's order now, when we know things exist in two contradictory ways simultaneously? Know? Ha! We can't know anything. What is proved quantum will someday be disproved and be fantom. Ecological systems rise and fall, empires rise and fall, and who ever knows who and what is right within that order? Only Justice knows if we walk in balance with the order of nature. Clearly we have strayed as humans from that path and we will pay for it. Will our collective human heart's ka be fed to the giant crocodile that waits in the river of history? Will we get back to intuiting what is right and what is chaos?

And what, Kind Reader you ask, is the personal stuff? Sigh. My mom has brain damage. She had brain surgery years ago and is only rarely the mother I grew up with. How much care do we owe our parents? What if they were a good parent? What if they were not so great? My mom needs care. Her house is falling down around her, symbolically and physically. While I was working on this painting and archetype, I was also getting Power of Attorney and a trust in place so that I could pick up the pieces of my mothers remaining life. In the last year I have had to replace her roof, her waterheater, her sewer line, her furnace, erradicate (unsuccessfully) the rats, and clean out her completely unpenetrable garage of junk. Am I doing this for some possible future inheritence? For the love of my parent who barely still exists? Out of obligation? Or is it the order of nature, that we care for our parents, even if they barely cared for us? So Justice for me was quite judicial, but also a deep dive into that river to determine what, in this day and age, upstream, will be right with my Ka, when my feather is weighed.

She holds your ka gently, like a feather

curling on your side,

You feel the cold metal of the scale

beneath your heart, beating.

She is the endless flow of the river, parting

around the moments in time,

shivering across your skin.

When the waters dry up, when they flood,

when they fertilize and quench, when they drown,

when they are both possibilities at the same time,

observed or unobserved,

She is Justice.