Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

The Card and Its Imagery

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
The Card and Its Imagery

The Two of Swords opens the Libra decans in the air suit's zodiacal sequence, the Moon ruling the sign's first ten degrees before Saturn takes the Three of Swords at Libra's second decan and Jupiter the Four at its third; the Moon governing the suit's own first card is read in Book T as an emotional undercurrent beneath a scene that otherwise looks entirely rational, the crossed swords held in balance concealing, rather than resolving, whatever the Moon stirs beneath them.

Pamela Colman Smith's picture, a blindfolded woman seated by the sea under a crescent moon, two crossed swords held upright against her chest, is one of the deck's more visually spare compositions, its meaning carried almost entirely by posture rather than by incident; it has no equivalent in the Tarot de Marseille, whose Deux d'Epees is two crossed blades in a formal lattice, read by cartomancers from number and suit alone, without any figure, blindfold or moon to interpret. The blindfold recurs elsewhere in the deck, most notably on Justice and on the Eight of Swords, and commentators generally treat its appearance here as marking a choice deliberately not yet made rather than one imposed from outside.

The Golden Dawn title, Peace Restored, and Crowley's shortened Peace for the Thoth deck both frame the balance as achieved rather than merely held, a somewhat more settled reading than Smith's tense, blindfolded figure suggests on its own; Harris renders the two swords as a symmetrical geometric arrangement under a lunar glyph, calmer in composition than the Rider-Waite-Smith scene, without any figure straining to maintain the balance shown.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.