VEIL

The Decan Atlas

Gemini II

10°–20° Gemini · The Sun walks this face May 31 – June 11

Nine of Swords

The card of this face

Nine of Swords

In Book T — the Golden Dawn’s tarot manuscript of 1888 — this card is titled The Lord of Despair and Cruelty.

Read the full meaning of Nine of Swords

Who rules here

Ruler of the face

Mars

By the Chaldean order — the one planetary sequence that Agrippa, the Picatrix and the Golden Dawn all keep.

Ruler of the sign

Mercury

Gemini

The two angels of the face

In the Shem ha-Mephorash — the 72-fold name drawn letter by letter from Exodus — two angels keep each face, one for each half of its ten degrees: Anauel holds the first five, Mehiel the last.

The image of the face

A man holding a pipe, and another bowed low, digging the earth — the tune above, the toil below.

A face of jugglers and jesters, of painful searching and labours that entertain more than they feed.

Image and signification after Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, book II ch. 37 (1533; English 1651), a lineage descending through the Latin Picatrix. Card titles quoted from the Golden Dawn’s Book T (1888). All sources rest in the public domain.

Under this face

Thought turns on itself. Under this face despair is a trick the mind plays in the dark — name the tune, and the digging stops.

The sky never stops moving. Draw your card while this face is still lit.

Draw a card under this face