🌗♉︎: The Two of Swords Helps us Break Through
Slow Tarot spread for this month: The Lovers crossed by the Two of Swords, the 8 of Cups, the Magician, the Chariot, the Ace of Wands.
In the waning light of last week’s intense full moon in Aquarius, I am contemplating this spread in the context of American individualism and its relationship to conspiracy thinking.
This full moon coincided with the senate hearing of Dr. Anthony Fauci, in which multiple American senators cited unproven conspiracies, misinformation, and pseudoscience to denigrate the nation’s lead doctor during the COVID-19 pandemic. 2020, the year in which the pandemic went global, was also the beginning of the Jupiter-Pluto cycle that peaked this month and was highlighted by the full moon. Jupiter signifies meaning and belief systems, while Pluto has to do with power, obsession, and unconscious shadow forces that Pluto’s slow transits often bring to the surface. It’s no wonder, astrologically at least, that the conspiracies birthed in 2020 would return to the forefront of public consciousness during this transit in 2026. As I write this, the nation’s lead health official, the quack philanderer and all around weirdo RFK Jr., informed CNN’s Dana Bash that individual liberties hold higher importance for America than public health, demonstrating that – at least for now, this declining empire has gleaned all the worst lessons from the last pandemic, which bodes poorly for us, considering that parasites, viruses, and food-borne illness are plaguing the land.
The Magician
The Magician – the number one of the major arcana – is the iconic individual of the tarot.
The Magician’s path of individuation is key to achieving self-actualization and becoming an active participant in the world. However, as the cards and stages of development teach us, when we get stuck and become attached to our identity as Magician, or anything for that matter, we can embody the unhealthy and afflicted qualities of the archetype. Scholar Stephen Mennell attributes the American identity of individualism in part to the history of settler colonialism and imperialism that defines the formation of America. Mennell posits that the development of democracy alongside this nation's violent expansion created a country without a consciousness rooted in a collective, a nation of every person for themself.
"When Americans express their pride in 'individualism,' they fundamentally mean the pursuit of self-interest with no concern for the public good, which, by means of magical-mythical thinking, they assume can be left to take care of itself" (Mennell, 2020 p 324).
Before America's penchant for individualism was so tragically exploited in 2020, there was a brief moment of pandemic-driven collective solidarity. Gestures of care erupted in large and small ways, often clumsy and imperfect, but sincere. This early phase of the pandemic was frightening and horrifying for those who suffered and the under-resourced care workers who strived to save them, and it also offered a rare glimpse of an American society with public good at the center. This was short-lived, and our toxic media apparatus and its many malevolent profiteers quickly pounded the individual liberty drums, rupturing and fracturing a populace on the brink. Instead of gleaning lessons from this time, we are now stuck in a morass of disinformation and relitigating conspiracies, while the few individuals who still choose to mask when sick or at risk are far outnumbered by a public who has chosen individual comfort over the bare minimum of care.
In Natalie Wynn's great video essay about conspiracy theories, she surmises that conspiracy thinking itself is a form of toxic individualism.
The practice of conspiracy thinking fulfills a deep-seated need to be special, to be smarter than those around you – I alone can find the truth that no one else is smart enough to know or see.
Conspiracism is not a new phenomenon in the US, but – like individualism – is woven into our fabric from our very beginnings. These generational patterns are resulting in deep harms to our collective body and virulent exploitation by those with power. The true "conspiracies" are out in the open, they are capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and corporatism, but they don't want you to see that, so the ruling class and our beholden media deflect and disrupt through political theater and ever-increasing absurdity.
The Lovers crossed by the Two of Swords
At the heart of this spread is the Lovers crossed by the Two of Swords.
In the tarot, the Lovers historically has indicated a choice point. Older cards show a man between two women, illustrating the process of transitioning from an adult child to an equal partner of another. As the Lovers has evolved, we know see two naked adults meeting underneath the arms of an angel, speaking to the divine and fateful experience of falling in love. We fall because it feels somewhat out of our control, and love creates fools of us all, exposing our foibles and vulnerabilities as we stand in our nakedness before another. I often do not read the Lovers card solely in the context of love, but more as a guide that speaks to our sense of belonging to the world, of being in honest, vulnerable, and caring relationship to all that surrounds us.
In this way, the Lovers is a critical and seemingly skipped step in our evolution as a culture, if we are to make it through these testing and trying times.
The Two of Swords can also be said to be a card of indecision, but in the context of all of the above, I'm currently sitting with it as an invitation for integration. The process of pattern-breaking involves the gentle development of new habits.
Knowing that our cultural default is perilous individualism and the exploitation of conspiracy thinking, the Two of Swords offers a pause before a reaction, and another perspective to consider.
The Lovers is where we dissolve individualism, hierarchy, and supremacy, acknowledging that all are on equal footing and deserving of consideration and care. The Two of Swords invites in our intuitive and receptive wisdom to arise from the depths of what's been hidden, suppressed, and rejected by overculture. She is an invitation to protect ourselves from the conspiracies of bad actors that seek to exploit our fear, pain, and emotional needs. The waxing crescent moon above the blindfolded figure indicates fertile conditions for a seed of care to grow, our seed of practicing ways of being rooted in the collective good.
The moon and the seated woman in front of the water are remniscient of the major arcana’s two, the High Priestess.
Our inner knowing isn’t just about what we believe to be true, it’s about connecting to our emotional experience and the needs our beliefs are fulfilling. As we learn to identify these needs, we can better reparent and attend to those emotions that contribute to beliefs and behaviors that do not serve ourselves and those around us.
The 8 of Cups
And below the spread's heart lies the 8 of Cups, in which we see the solar eclipsed by the lunar above the figure who is leaving his structures behind.
We are currently heading into eclipse season, and with it, change and chaos are sure to come. Becoming conscious of our patterns is a moment in which our internal suns and moons collide. So many of our individual habits, tendencies, and ways operate beneath our conscious awareness, only breaking through when we are ready to transform them, or when we can no longer ignore them. Pluto transits often herald this type of breakthrough on a personal level, and may bring disruption and chaos with the potential of transforming these patterns for the better.
So too, then, perhaps this Jupiter-Pluto collective transit is an invitation, at least here in the states, for individuals of conscience and care to examine our internalizations of individualism and those effects, on our own lives and how they ripple through our communities at scale.
As I discussed in my first reading of this spread, the Chariot is a vehicle that moves through the alignment of disparate forces, of the conscious and unconscious. This process of integration could be generative for new energy, ideas, even collective action, to emerge. The Ace of Wands is the potent force of life, pure fire.
The Ace of Wands
Sitting at the top of this spread, it is the possibility of this moment, if we can do the hard work of moving from the Magician to the Chariot.
This is an unfamiliar path, involving the shedding of habits and structures learned over generations. And alongside that dissolution, a commitment to collective care, and a willingness to uphold that commitment amidst a bevy of forces that seek to destroy it. It is not conspiracism to identify the real structures of power and profit in our society and the ways in which they operate to maintain rupture and discord of the collective.
