Two of Coins

The Two of Coins is the most historically informative card in the entire deck, and almost nobody reads it that way.

In the French woodblock patterns the two coins are joined by a ribbon or scroll forming a long loop, and that scroll is not decorative: it is a cartouche, and printers used it to sign their work. Surviving Marseille-pattern Twos of Coins carry cardmakers' names, cities and sometimes dates, printed into the design. In a period when playing cards were taxed and regulated, the maker's mark was a legal requirement as much as a boast.

This is why the card can be dated when others cannot, and why it is disproportionately useful to historians of the deck. The scroll is a shop sign.

Pamela Colman Smith kept the loop in 1909 and turned it into a lemniscate, the figure-eight of infinity, held by a dancing juggler balancing two coins. The occult reading of the card as cycles, flux and eternal exchange follows from that reinterpretation of a printer's ribbon. It is a good reading. Its source is a trade mark.

In practice the card is read for juggling: two commitments held at once, cash flow, adaptability, and the specific competence of keeping several things going without dropping any. Its shadow is the obvious one, the juggling cannot continue indefinitely, and the card sometimes marks a querent who has mistaken managing a problem for solving it.

It is a small card and an easy one to skim past in a spread. It is also, for anyone interested in where the tarot came from rather than what it means, the single most evidential card in the deck, because it is the one that tells you who printed it and when.

Beyond its usefulness to historians, the Two of Coins does a specific and rather narrow job in a reading.

The standard sense is the management of two demands at once, and the readings divide on the tone. The competent reading takes the juggler at his word: the querent is handling it, adaptability is a genuine skill, and the card affirms a difficult arrangement that is nonetheless working. The sceptical reading notices that juggling is by definition unstable, that nothing in the picture is at rest, and that the card describes an equilibrium requiring continuous effort to maintain.

The second reading tends to be more useful in practice, because querents rarely consult an oracle about arrangements that are comfortable. A person who draws this card is usually managing something, and the question worth asking is what happens when they stop.

The card also has an old and stubbornly practical association with money in motion, cash flow rather than capital, payments that arrive and leave, and the difference between being solvent and being liquid. That reading is closer to the eighteenth-century cartomancers than to any esoteric system, and it survives because it keeps being right.

Waite's reversed meanings run to enforced gaiety, simulated enjoyment and a message received, which is one of the more peculiar entries in his lists and does not map onto the modern convention at all. Readers who do not turn cards read the strain into the upright picture, where it is already perfectly visible without anyone having to rotate anything.