The Star
Related material
Images
The Marseilles card
The Waite-Smith card
Stage V - Sacrifice
This stage consists of two cards: The Star first, then Justice. It is in this stage that the Fool’s ego personality is sacrificed. The Lovers card is considered part of this stage, but also of the following stage, so I will defer its description until then.
At this point, as the Merkabah consciousness is experienced, the Fool becomes aware of himself/herself as a group entity, and not only as an individual being. Awareness has expanded to include a whole host of spiritual beings from many different realms, of which the Fool is now conscious. The experience of The Star comes first.
The Star
A kneeling woman is depicted pouring water from two jugs into a lake or ocean. This is the same figure depicted on Transference and has a related meaning. However, the salient elements of this card are the star and the bird that rests in or flies near a tree.
The star is the consciousness shown in The Hermit, but here it is no longer attached to anything; consciousness is able to exist independently of the physical body as a being in its own right. It is still the consciousness of the Fool, yet it is also not, as it has become much more.
The bird is a parallel symbol. It is exactly the same as the Ba body, well-known from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, where it is shown flying from a prone physical body upwards toward a tree; the Ba is the soul body, the Merkabah—a real, permanent being, albeit not a physical one.
Note that the glyph for Aquarius, the sign associated with The Star, consists of two wavy lines, separate from each other, unlike the glyph for Pisces and The Hermit, where the two elements are connected. In this state, consciousness can exist separately from the physical body; the two have been decoupled.