“I am posting the pips as sets of four showing the permutations of each element as it reaches the next stage. Roughly defined Wands stand for Fire and for a person’s will and spirit, Cups stand for Water and the emotions and soul, Swords for Air and the intellect and rational thought, and Disks represent Earth and the body and physical being.
In the 2s, each of the element gets doubled up, i.e. it gets to react to a similar impulse. With two material states the result is change. You move from one state to the other, from young to old, from rich to poor, from cold to warm.
The meaning of the card points to the power of opposites, yin-yang, polarization and opposing forces, but also to the eternal cycle where one state gets retransmuted into the other. The card urges us to realize that everything has two sides and to abandon one-sided standpoints and outlooks and is best approached with a certain amount of flexibility and an easy-going attitude.
For an image I chose an imaginary bit of marble flooring at Hogwarts that shows a mosaic of the two most opposite houses – Gryffindor and Slytherin. And yet we have two members of those houses who did a complete about-face: Wormtail, who proved more treacherous than any snake, and Snape, who proved braver than any of Godric’s lions. I swiped the braided surround design from a bit of floorspace at St. Marco’s in Venice.”
Commentary
Image title supplied by the artist.
The artist designed this tarot card with an imagined mosaic on the Hogwarts flooring, featuring the symbols of Gryffindor and Slytherin. These two houses are polar opposites, yet we see two examples of characters changing from one to the other: Peter Pettigrew started off in Gryffindor, but became evil; Professor Snape started off in Slytherin, yet became braver than them all.