Decan Walking Gemini I: The Eight of Swords // Lord of Interference
May 21 – May 31 | 0–10º Gemini
Last night I was on my floor surrounded by cards. The kitchen table was covered.
Not in a chaotic, knocked-over-my-tea kind of way — in a very deliberate, very me kind of way. I pulled every Eight of Swords, every Wheel of Fortune, every Lovers card I own from every deck I own and laid them out in rows so I could look at them all at once. I was planning on filming a YouTube video for #TarotTube, and I wanted to be ready. I wanted to have absorbed the energy, sat with the imagery, and feel my way into it before I had to articulate it.
Which, if you know anything about what I’m about to tell you, is deeply funny.
Because what I was doing — gathering information, organizing it,preparing to expand and transmit it — is one of the most Gemini I things a person can do. And I did it the night before Gemini I even began. I was so eager to understand the decan that I performed it in advance. The Sun was chilling at 29 degrees and hadn’t even crossed 0º Gemini yet and I was already knee-deep in its signature energy: Mercury collecting every thread, Jupiter trying to make it mean something.
Here I am now, writing this on May 21st — the first day of the first decan of Gemini — and I keep thinking about something. I didn’t have to prepare. The decan was going to arrive whether I was ready or not. The Wheel turns on its own schedule. But I chose to be ready. I relied on my will to meet my fate.
That tension — between what is fated and what is chosen — is exactly what this decan is about. And honestly? I think they might be the same thing. But we’ll get there.
First Things First: What Is a Decan Walk? What is a Decan?
If you’re new here or new to the decan walk practice, welcome. I’m also a newbie to this practice, but astrology was my first love. If you don’t have a background in either, it’s okay- don’t quit before the miracle happens.
So let’s do a Quick orientation:
The zodiac is divided into twelve signs, and each sign is further divided into three decans of ten degrees each. So instead of just Gemini, we have Gemini I, Gemini II, and Gemini III — each with its own planetary ruler, tarot card, and distinct flavor. The decans give us a more granular, textured understanding of the zodiac. Think of the sign as the neighborhood and the decan as the specific street you’re on.
The decan walk is a practice where you intentionally move through each decan of the year alongside the Sun’s transit, using it as a framework for deepening your understanding of astrology, tarot, and yourself. Some people use it as a journaling practice. Some use it as a study structure. Some use it to deepen their relationship with specific cards or planetary energies. There’s no one right way to do it — that’s the whole point. You make it your own.
If you want to see how I approach the other decans in this series, start with Taurus III and work your way forward.
The Correspondences
Before we go any further, here’s the map:
| Factor | Correspondence |
|---|---|
| Dates | May 21 – May 31 |
| Decan | Gemini I |
| Zodiacal Degree | 0–10º Gemini |
| Planetary Rulers | Jupiter (Chaldean) / Mercury (triplicity) |
| Modality | Mutable Air |
| Element | Air |
| Tarot Card | Eight of Swords |
| Hermetic Title | Lord of Shortened Force / Lord of Interference |
| Major Arcana | The Wheel of Fortune (Jupiter) + The Lovers (Gemini) |
| Kabbalistic Sephira | Hod — Splendor |
| Decanic Image (Agrippa) | A man with a rod, serving another |
| Symbol (Coppock) | An Apple |
A quick note on the rulers, because this is one of the more interesting things about Gemini I: depending on which astrological system you’re working with, this decan is ruled by both Jupiter and Mercury. In the Chaldean system, Jupiter takes the wheel. In the triplicity system, Mercury does. I’m working Chaldean here, so Jupiter is our decan ruler — but honestly? The energy of this decan feels instinctively Mercurial to me. I can see Jupiter at work, especially when I start digging into the philosophy of it, but my first felt sense of this decan is quick and darty and detail-hungry. Very Mercury.
But that’s the beauty of the decan walk. You bring your own eye to it. See what you see.
The Planetary Tension: Jupiter and Mercury
To understand Gemini I, you have to understand what happens when these two planets share a space — because they do not naturally get along.
Mercury is right at home in Gemini. This is his sign. He is sharp, quick, and endlessly curious. He loves details, data, communication, and movement. Mercury is the one at the party talking to everyone, taking mental notes, synthesizing the room. In Gemini especially, he is gathering information and putting it back out into the world as fast as he can process it. Commerce, language, ideas, wit — all Mercury.
Jupiter is in detriment in Gemini. That means he’s uncomfortable here. Jupiter is the planet of expansion, philosophy, and big-picture truth. In his home sign of Sagittarius, he aims a single arrow at a single distant target and flies toward it with faith. In Gemini, that same expansive energy gets scattered across a dozen targets at once. Jupiter wants to ask what does it all mean? Mercury wants to ask but what about this part, and this part, and this part over here?
The image I keep coming back to: Mercury is running around the room collecting every single thread he can find, and Jupiter keeps trying to weave them into one grand unified tapestry. Mercury keeps finding more threads. Jupiter keeps losing the pattern. Neither of them is wrong. They’re just pulling in opposite directions.
This is the interference that is in depicted in the Thoth version of the eight of swords.
Fate vs. Free Will: The Thing This Decan Is Actually About
Here’s where I want to spend some time, because this is the question at the heart of Gemini I, and I find it genuinely fascinating.
The two major arcana associated with this decan are The Wheel of Fortune and The Lovers — and if you’ve spent any time with these cards, you already feel the tension. The Wheel of Fortune is the card of fate, destiny, cycles turning with or without your consent. The Lovers is the card of choice — the cleaving sword, the moment of decision, the fork in the road where you have to pick a path and walk it.
Jupiter rules the Wheel. Gemini rules the Lovers. They’re both present in this decan. And they are, in a very real sense, in a standoff.
The Wheel keeps spinning, handing out circumstances and destinies and disruptions. The Lovers mind wants to pause the wheel and analyze every possible outcome before committing. What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable, overthinking mind? You get the Eight of Swords. You get a person standing in a field, surrounded by their own thoughts, unable to move — not because they’re truly trapped, but because they’re paralyzed by the infinite branches of possibility. Follow this river and it splits. Follow that branch and it splits again. Every choice eliminates other choices. The mind, confronted with that infinity, sometimes just… stops.
I’m a Jungian at heart, and Jung had a lot to say about this particular bind. For Jung, fate and free will weren’t opposites — they were collaborators. He talked about individuation, the process of becoming who you actually are, as something that requires both: fate is the blueprint, the deep pattern your life is trying to trace, but it only actualizes through the choices you consciously make. You are not a passive recipient of your destiny. You are an active participant in its unfolding. Synchronicity — those moments of meaningful coincidence that feel almost too perfectly timed — is fate knocking on the door. Free will is whether you get up and answer it.
I also lean Stoic in how I move through the world, and the Stoics had a beautiful framework for this. Amor fati — love of fate. Not resignation to it. Not passive acceptance. Love. The recognition that the field you’re playing on was not chosen by you, but how you play is entirely yours. The only thing genuinely in your control is your perception, your response, your will. Everything else? The Wheel handles it.
So here’s where I’ve landed, and where this decan keeps bringing me back to: fate is the field. Free will is how you play. They are not opposites. They are the same truth told from two different angles.
The Eight of Swords is what happens when you forget that. When you stand on the field, blindfold slightly askew, and convince yourself you cannot move. The Wheel got you there. Your own mind keeps you there. And the sword of choice — the Lovers energy, the capacity to cleave and commit and decide — is what gets you out.
I was on my floor last night laying out cards because the Sun was going to enter Gemini I whether I was ready or not. That was fated. I chose to be ready. Both things are true and both things matter. That’s the whole decan in miniature.
The Eight of Swords: The Card Itself
Let’s look at the cardsssss.
The Eight of Swords goes by several names: Lord of Shortened Force, Lord of Interference. Both titles are a go. Both are doing something slightly different. “Shortened Force” points to the Jupiter problem — all that expansive energy, cut off at the nose. “Interference” points to the Mercury problem — too many signals, too much static, the transmission breaking down.
In the Rider-Waite-Smith 8 of Swords, we have a woman bound and blindfolded, standing in muddy ground, eight swords planted in the earth around her in a loose formation. There’s a castle in the distance. The water at her feet hints at emotion — something just below the surface, barely accessible.
A few things to notice: her bindings are loose. Her feet are not bound. One eye peeks out from the blindfold. The swords are around her, not touching her. She could walk out. The path forward is technically clear. The card is not about an external cage — it’s about a psychological one. The mind overwhelmed by information, by possibility, by its own relentless analyzing, has convinced itself it cannot move. The captivity is real in the sense that it is experienced as real. But it is also, at its core, self-maintained.
This is the RWS gift: it puts you inside the experience. You know this feeling. You’ve stood in that field. You’ve been the one peeking through the blindfold, knowing on some level you could move, and not moving anyway.
The Thoth Eight of Swords takes a different approach. Where the RWS shows you the phenomenology of being stuck, the Thoth shows you the mechanics of the interference itself. Eight blades — two larger swords at the top and six smaller ones forming a grid below — against a deep Jovian purple background, with sharp orange erupting through it. Orange is Gemini’s color. Purple is Jupiter’s. The visual is the planet tension made literal: the Gemini signal trying to break through the Jovian noise, and creating static in the process.
It’s more abstract. More structural. And in some ways it maps more cleanly onto the planetary dynamic we’ve been talking about — the shortened force as a visual phenomenon, the interference rendered in color and geometry rather than human figure.
Both versions are right. Both are showing you the same room from different windows. The RWS asks: how does this feel? The Thoth asks: what is actually happening?
I find both of those questions useful, which is why I keep both decks on the floor when I’m researching.
Agrippa, the Face of Literature, and Margaret Atwood
This is the part I did some research on and kind of struggled with. In his Renaissance magical text De Occulta Philosophia, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa describes the first face of Gemini like this: a man in whose hand is a rod, and he is as it were serving another — and it grants wisdom, the knowledge of numbers and arts. He calls it the Face of Literature and Science. The people of this decan are observers. Recorders. Writers. I want to say they are the archivists- but that might be more hermit-related.
I want to be careful not to overstate this, but — the image of the man with the rod, serving another, is doing something quietly profound. The intellect here is not self-aggrandizing. It gathers, it records, it transmits. It serves the signal. Mercury’s job is not to be the message but to carry it.
The contemporary figure who keeps coming up in discussions of this decan is Margaret Atwood, who has her rising sign in Gemini I. If you’ve been following along on this blog, I wrote about Atwood and the You Fit Into Me imagery in relation to the Eight of Swords — you can read that here. The short version: the Gemini I rising gives her that Observer-Recorder quality, the ability to watch society from a glass-bottomed boat and write down exactly what she sees beneath the surface. The Jovian influence in her chart gives her the expansive philosophical vision that makes those observations feel prophetic.
If you want to go deep on Atwood and this decan placement, Cathy Gnatek — an astrologer whose content I genuinely love — has a video that goes into the astrology of the gemini 1 decan. [Go watch it.] Cathy’s analysis is what put this connection on my radar and I think about it every time I pull this card.
Hod: The Kabbalistic Layer
Okay, full transparency: Kabbalah is not my strongest area. I’ve been doing research and I find it genuinely fascinating in relation to this decan, but take this section as me sharing what I’ve learned rather than speaking from deep expertise. If this is your wheelhouse, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
With that said — the Eight of Swords is assigned to Hod, the eighth sphere on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Hod means Splendor or Majesty, and it’s Mercury’s domain on the Tree: the realm of intellect, language, and the place where big abstract energy gets broken down into forms the human mind can actually hold and work with.
Think of it this way: Hod is where the ineffable gets translated. Where vision becomes words. Where the numinous becomes something speakable and shareable. It’s the sphere of ritual and articulation — the act of giving form to things that don’t naturally have form. Which, when you think about it, is exactly what writing does. Exactly what the Face of Literature does.
Here’s the tension though: those same tools — language, analysis, the endless capacity to categorize and reason — can become their own kind of trap. The Eight of Swords lives in Hod because Hod, at its most tangled, produces endless counter-argument. An argument for every argument. A caveat for every claim. The analytical mind turns on itself until nothing moves and nothing gets transmitted.
The resolution, from what I can gather, is also Hodian: a kind of submission. Letting language become service rather than performance. The messenger’s job is to carry the signal, not to become it. When that clicks into place — when the ego steps back and the intellect accepts its role as vessel — the static clears. Hod at its best is not the cage. It’s the clear channel.
Sitting With the Decan
So here we are. May 21st (now 23rd). The Sun just crossed into Gemini I, and I’ve been up since before it happened, metaphorically speaking, laying out cards and making notes and trying to meet this energy with intention.
What does this decan ask of us for the next ten days?
Drake has a line that lives rent free in my head — something about how you could be standing in the field and still not be in the field. And I think about that constantly in relation to this card. Because that’s exactly it. That’s the Eight of Swords. You are physically present in your life and simultaneously nowhere near it, running probability calculations in your head while the actual moment passes by untouched.
I think this decan asks us to notice where we’re doing that. Where are you blindfolded by your own information overload? Where are you running so many possible futures through your head that none of them are actually being lived? Where are the bindings loose — where is the path technically clear — and what is the story you’re telling yourself about why you can’t move?
And on the other side of that: where is fate moving in your life right now, with or without your participation? What Wheel has turned? What is landing in your lap that you didn’t plan for, that you couldn’t have predicted, that is asking you to respond?
The Gemini I decan invitation is to do both things. Gather your information — Mercury needs that, and there’s nothing wrong with preparation. But let Jupiter remind you that there is a point at which more information does not produce more clarity. At some point you have to pick up the sword. You have to choose. You have to love the fate you’re in enough to play it well.
I laid out my cards the night before. I organized my research. I relied on my will to meet my fate.
Now I’m writing. Now you’re reading. The decan is doing exactly what it does.
If you’re doing the decan walk and want to share what’s coming up for you during Gemini I, drop it in the comments. I always love hearing how this energy is moving through other people’s lives and practices.
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