Sign: Gemini | Sign Ruler: Mercury | Decan Ruler: Sun Element: Air | Mode: Mutable Mercury rules Gemini by domicile, governing communication, movement, and exchange. The Sun rules this decan by face, contributing visibility, confidence, authority, and purpose. The Sun has no major essential dignity in Gemini, but operates through Mercury’s intellectual and communicative nature. This creates a face associated with public expression, encouragement, leadership, and purposeful action. Core Principle: Expression through visibility.

Liber Hermetis
“The third decan of Gemini has the face of the Sun. Its name is Azuel. It has the beautiful face of Isis, having hair moves every which way.”

Picatrix
“In the third face of Gemini ascends a man covered in chain mail with a bow, arrows, and a quiver. This is the face of daring, honesty, the division of labour, and encouragement. This is its form.”

As we step into the last decan of Gemini, something stirs, something which has been still, for what feels like an age of the world. The voice, so long folded inward, so long turned away from the company of others, tentatively begins to move towards expression. This is the territory of the last decan of Gemini, where the Sun enters the mercurial realm of exchange and visibility and lifts what has been hidden into the light, with full solar authority. The Golden Dawn gave this land to The Ten of Swords, and named it Ruin. The image conjured seems to contradict the older decanic witnesses, which emphasise beauty, courage, encouragement, but the title becomes more intelligible when understood as the exhaustion of what this decan embodies.

Ten always marks some manner of completion, and here communication fragments, and the clarity of the message is lost. The armoured archer of the Picatrix offers a suggestive image: the bow gives direction to the arrow, concentrating potential into a single trajectory, while the Golden Dawn’s title of Ruin, represents the shadow of the heraldic function, the collapse that occurs when expression loses the direction that once gave the message its force, scattering the words to the four winds.

The figure who presides here is both beautiful and armed; she wears the face of Isis, she who has already descended, has already gathered the scattered pieces of what she loved and passed through the underworld. She carries a bow, a weapon of distance and aim, framing a willingness to release; to let the arrow leave the hand towards a chosen target. and this choosing is the daring act this decan demands.

Our task here is to release the strange new knowledge of our own dimensions, our understanding of what endures and the altered relationship to time to the particular quality of light in a world that has been irrevocably changed. It is here that our herald announces; speaking in a voice recognisably ours and yet changed, saying: I was here; I went somewhere; I have returned with something to tell you. We may know at some level that the proclomation is already overdue, but also that somewhere in the world there are people who wish to hear what we, having made the journey, have to say.

This is a decan of honest emergence; the solar insistence on being present again. It is here, in this domain that we can find our voice once more, after the long silence of necessary grief. If the message is at first, difficult to understand, or varies slightly in it’s meaning, that too is part of the beauty, for what is being communicated is the visible act of speaking, the communication of a self that has passed through an ordeal and chosen, deliberately and with full knowledge of what it has cost, to continue.

This is a project in the making. We will be working on it over the next number of months, possibly years, and it will take as long as it takes. Having been incubating for three years already, it seems it is now time to announce that this project is on its way. Give us a follow on Kickstarter to be notified at the start of the campaign…… and who knows how far this arrow will fly!