Golden Scales

Zeus, having banished the other gods from the field of battle, takes up his golden scales and places in them two fates, kēre, of death, one for the Trojans and one for the Greeks; and the ‘fated day’ of the Greeks sinks down.

Adkins presents the golden scales as the pivotal Homeric evidence that a power over which even Zeus has no control — Fate itself — may be superior to the gods, since the weight of the kēres is independent of divine will.

Arthur W.H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis

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her scales will not weigh eye against eye nor mete out reward and punishment. The intricacies of human behavior are too various and subtle to be thus mechanically determined.

Nichols reinterprets Justice’s scales in Jungian terms as an instrument of psychic compensation and wholeness rather than punitive reciprocity, dissolving the lex talionis reading of the image.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980thesis

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the application of law by a judge is an operation of feeling, and that laws were invented not merely to protect property or assure the priesthood and ruling-class of their power, but also to evaluate difficult human problems and to do justice in human affairs.

Through Hillman, Nichols aligns the Tarot scales with the feeling function and Saturnine astrological symbolism, arguing that genuine judgment is an affective rather than purely rational operation.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting

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The psyche is a self-regulating system whose aim is not perfection but wholeness and equilibrium.

Nichols frames the archetype of balance — which the scales embody — within Jung’s doctrine of psychic self-regulation, linking the image to the broader goal of equilibrium rather than moral perfection.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting

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On the ideogram of the scales and the problem of the Mycenaean talent, see Louis Deroy, Initiation à l’épigraphie mycénienne.

Detienne situates the scales iconogram within Mycenaean institutional and metrological practice, providing an archival grounding for the symbol’s juridical prehistory prior to its Homeric and mythological elaboration.

Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, 1996aside

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The golden creature rising on our right is usually connected with Anubis, the dog-faced god of Egypt who weighed the souls of the dead. He is thought of as a positive, integrative factor.

Nichols notes the Egyptian psychostasia tradition — Anubis weighing souls — as a parallel context in which scales imagery serves an integrative, judgment-of-the-dead function adjacent to the Tarot’s Justice archetype.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980aside

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