Gemini II: Drag me to hell

Nine of Swords

Gemini II: 

9 of Swords

You bolt up in bed, heart thumping, breath racing. It’s 3:00 AM and there’s no way you’re getting back to sleep.

“Oh why the hell did I do that?” plays on constant repeat in your mind.

In what astrologer Austin Coppock said was the decan of “art and war,” Gemini II sees us  experiencing the crippling anxiety that lives in the space between one’s actions and the impending consequences. Coppock called it a sharpened sword that is turned inward. 

In the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, a figure sits upright in bed, hands covering their face. Nine swords hang horizontally behind them — suspended. It is, unmistakably, a nightmare card. The quilt is covered in roses and astrological symbols, evoking beauty and the fates. But looking closer: none of those swords have landed. The suffering is, so far, entirely interior. The mind has built its own prison--loaded with weapons--and locked itself inside.

Nine of Swords

On a 2024 episode of the Astrology Podcast, Adira Osland pointed to something I keep returning to: Mars isn't a thinking planet. It's a body planet — adrenaline, fight-or-flight, the act in progress before the mind catches up. Put that in Gemini, a sign that lives entirely in its head, and you get a particular kind of torment: the body already knows, and the mind won't stop relitigating it. 

That tension? It’s what astrologer and artist Nicola Allan called: “Venus, the goddess of beauty and love, and Mars, the god of war and conflict, [who] are both compelled and equally repelled by each other.” 

You can’t look away from a car crash. We know it’s awful and yet–we do this to ourselves. 

The major arcana, noted by T. Susan Chang, are the Lovers and the Tower. The Lovers is a card that represents choice and an underlying commandment to choose the spiritual or higher good. The Tower is the card that happens when we don’t. 

Remember that scene in the movie Ghost, where Carl – the shitty friend who killed Patrick Swayze’s character–ultimately meets his demise and is hauled off by demons?

Now those are consequences. Those demons at the end aren’t punishment from the outside; they’re the consequence architecture that Carl built himself. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y2wqkD2KVM

The tarot is telling us that when we are knowingly acting in misalignment, our bodies hold that tension.

Sleepless nights. Sweaty palms.