Dodal
Le Jugement · XX
An angel blows a trumpet above three figures. A cross appears on the hanging banner. The central person faces away from the viewer, between two figures turned toward the scene above.
A summons and a changed theology
The trumpet scene gives way to a different arrangement of divine and human figures. Compare the images first; then ask how each author explains transformation.
Start with the pictures
Le Jugement · XX
Jean Dodal · Lyon, 1701–1715
Open the source image ↗
Judgement · XX
Pamela Colman Smith · 1922 printing, p. 149
Open the source scan page ↗Notice what changes
Smith
Judgement · XX
The trumpet and cross-bearing banner remain. Open coffins occupy a watery landscape; there are people in the distance as well as the three nearest figures. Their raised arms repeat across the scene.
Harris
The Aeon · XX
An arched blue figure encloses a seated figure and a larger translucent child. A winged disk crosses the lower part. Three small figures appear within the letter-like form near the bottom; there is no trumpeting angel.
Open Harris’s painting and reference page ↗Now read the authors
Waite’s explanation
Waite gives the resurrection scene an inward sense: the summons is heard and answered within. He explicitly asks readers to look beyond a merely bodily resurrection and connects the card with Temperance.
Crowley’s explanation
Crowley names Nuit, Hadit and the two forms of Horus, presenting the redesigned card as an adaptation of the Stélé of Revealing. The figures within Shin participate in his new Aeon. This is his Thelemic theology.
Which change belongs to the pictured scene, which to its author’s theology, and which to your own experience?
Write one thing you can point to in the image, one interpretation from a named author, and one inference of your own. Keeping the three separate gives you something useful to revisit.
Read the contemporary essay
Use the Triptych essay as a further interpretation, then return to the primary passages to test the contrast it proposes. Agreement about renewal need not imply agreement about history or religion.
Sources and image credits
The Dodal cards are one early-eighteenth-century Marseille witness. The black-and-white Smith plates come from the 1922 Rider reprint, whose title verso lists first publication in 1910. Colours in later editions can differ.
The images shown here are reproduced from public-domain sources, with their original borders and page context.
- Jean Dodal · source record and rights statement ↗
- Pamela Colman Smith · source record and rights statement ↗
Harris’s paintings are linked on their host’s reference pages. Crowley’s text is the separately identified Thelemagick transcription of The Book of Thoth. Neither a modern reproduction nor a transcription replaces examination of the original artwork or edition.