The last two cards, the Devil and the Tower, have each represented two of the most critical trials the Questor has had to face during the Fool's path towards liberation, or gnosis. Now the Star is about to hint at that first inkling that the this Quest may finally be drawing towards an end. The Star is perhaps that glimpse of recognition when the first sighting of land from sea or distant mountain peaks has been made; the succour which comes from knowing that while still being far off, the way forward is clearer now. The Star is about distant hopes and aspirations, or lofty ideals. It may be our lodestone, or spur, to greater things in what might otherwise be darkness or confusion.

As the Star usually depicts a young woman pouring water into a pond, it hints at an astrological parallel with the sign Aquarius. Aquarius is about the hopes and wishes of humanity, about the visions and ideals which may help to raise the consciousness of humanity - and perhaps also of the entire planet. The waters may then be the waters of spiritual renewal for thirsty souls, a rebirth into higher levels of awareness. Like the Obelisk in the film 2001, evolution on all levels may be accelerated so that finally we may indeed reach for the stars, into the kind of pleromatic awareness to which SF writers like Arthur C. Clarke or Olaf Stapledon seem to be constantly drawn in their visions of cosmic cities and sentient solar systems. This kind of mystical vision also appears to be expressed in the writings of Teilhard de Chardin who seemed to feel that an increasing and more sophisticated use of mass-media technology might create around the planet Earth, what he called the "nousphere", a kind of a sentient cyberspace without any of the negative soul-entrapping qualities of the latter. Time, he seems to suggest, might help eventuate the pleromisation of Earth and the solar system ("pleromatisation" means to "make full in a mystical sense", from the word "pleroma"). This is why the design in this pack includes images of the City with its aerials, symbols of the spreading of mass-media information, in the background of the card. Here the City symbolises the promise of John Michell's Jerusalem, where heaven and earth become one, where Arthur C. Clarke's visions of sentient, cosmic cities may become a reality.

This vision of an elevated consciousness does not have to see our species as being genetically selfish, spreading our civilisation on this planet like a cancerous parasite at the expense of Gaia. Instead, humanity and Nature together may have the impulse to reach ever higher forms of synergy, where the whole is greater than its components. Amidst the turgid outpourings of Bailey and Blavatsky, we may begin to see the buried intuition that humanity who as conscious beings as co-creators of reality may be agents of this process of transformation (or pleromatisation). This is what was first meant when it was suggested that the Fool's Quest was not necessarily a totally individual one. As part of Gaia, each individual, with a head rich in neurones and memes, may become one of Gaia's agents in the Great Work.