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Zayin, Gemini, and Choice as the Older Meaning

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Zayin, Gemini, and Choice as the Older Meaning

The Golden Dawn assigned the sixth trump the letter Zayin, the sign Gemini, and the seventeenth path from Binah to Tiphareth. Zayin means a sword, and the choice of a cutting instrument for a card about love is deliberate: in the order's system this card is about discrimination, the act of separating one thing from another, which is closer to the older French picture than to Waite's Eden. Gemini, the twins, supplies the doubling.

The attribution is late nineteenth century, like all of them. What is interesting is that it preserves the dilemma reading even though the deck it was attached to had abandoned it. The Golden Dawn's own sense of the card, and Crowley's after it, keeps the emphasis on decision, analysis and the union that follows an act of separation, rather than on romance.

In practice the card is read for relationships more often than for anything else, and that is a narrowing rather than an error. Its wider and better range covers any decision where the querent's values are what is actually being tested: what to commit to, what to refuse, what one is prepared to be. Readers who take the card only as "love is coming" tend to miss it entirely when it turns up in a question about work.

Reversed, Waite gives disharmony, misalignment and a bond broken. Readers who do not use reversals arrive at much the same reading by asking a simpler question of the upright card: chosen, or still choosing?

It is also worth saying that the two decks in widest use disagree here more sharply than on any other trump except Strength. A reader who learned the card from a Waite-derived deck and then picks up a Marseille pattern will find an image that does not support the meaning they were taught, and the sensible response is to read the picture in front of them rather than the keyword in their memory.

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