The Two of Swords

There are several Minor Arcana cards that feel like a series to me, built around a general theme of "retreat." They're not linked by numbers or suits, but the imagery seems like such a clear match that it's hard not to see them as connected. This card is one, and we'll talk about another – the Four of Pentacles – next.

The Two of Swords shares a lot of imagery with The High Priestess. The moon is prominent, though it's in the sky above the figure instead of at her feet. The color scheme is similar. The figure wears a robe that, at least to me, looks a lot like the base layer of the High Priestess's robes.

Both figures are seated on a solid, flat pedestal, with a large body of water behind them. While the water depicted on The High Priestess is obscured by the tapestry, I get the sense that it's unbroken, while the Two of Swords looks like a rocky coast, full of small islands.

Melissa Cynova refers to the Major Arcana as "your life in ALL CAPS." In many ways, I think of the Two of Swords as the "lowercase" High Priestess. This card is about a turn towards introspection and the internal. The High Priestess is the embodiment of what we encounter when we make that turn.

I think it's easy to get a feel for this card just by looking at what's literally happening. This woman has moved away from people – I read that as showing the aforementioned introspection. She's blindfolded herself – again, this reads as introspection, cutting herself off from the outside world. She's holding two swords, one in either hand. Given that she's cut off from everything else, this must be what she's focusing on. I don't get the sense that they're for defense. Again, she's alone and blindfolded, so it doesn't seem like she anticipates enemies.

Instead, we can assume that all of the isolation and introspection is ultimately about these two swords. She's literally weighing her options.

When writing about the Ten of Swords, I mentioned that swords usually stand for intellect, wit, and ideas. You may have wondered how we knew that. This is one of many cards that gives me that impression. Whatever object was in the woman's hands, we could generally understand that this was a card about making a decision. Because we know that "making a decision" is represented specifically as "weighing two swords," we get the sense that swords are inherently linked to thinking deeply about something.

That's how all symbols in the Tarot work. They may make some sense in isolation, but they become deeper, more complex, and more useful to us as readers when we understand them in context, as part of a web of meaning that stretches from card to card.

In a reading, this card usually means that the querent is facing an important decision, and that they have the information they need to make the right choice. There's a Lovecraft novel that begins "[t]he most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." Like many things Lovecraft said, I think this is incorrect, but I do love the phrasing – I read the Two of Swords as a card about correlating the contents of your mind. Take time to arrange and process what you know, and you know enough to handle whatever challenges you're facing.