Two of Disks
Name: Change, the Two of Disks
Number: 2
Astrology: Jupiter in Capricorn
Qabalah: Chokmah of He
Chris Gabriel October 26, 2024
The Two of Disks is an infinite loop surrounding two coins. It represents the endless movement of the universe. This materializes as the beginning of our own growth and movement.
In Rider, we find a young jester juggling two pentacles around which a loop forms a symbol of infinity. He wears green shoes, a tan tunic, and a tall hat. Behind him great waves move distant ships.
In Thoth, we find an ouroboros: a crowned serpent forming infinity by biting its own tail. The two disks which it encircles are Yin Yangs containing the four elements: fire and water above, air and earth below. This card is a cosmogram, an image of the ever changing universe.
In Marseille, we find two coins encircled by a loop that doesn’t reach infinity, at each end flowers sprout. Across the variety of Marseille decks, you will find this to be the ‘stamped’ card, where the creator makes their mark. This role is played by the Ace of Spades in a traditional playing card deck. As a two it belongs to Chokmah, Wisdom, and from Disks, it is the Princess. Change is the Wisdom of the Princess.
The Ace of Disks is the seed and the foundation of the suit of disks, and so the Two of Disks, Change, is the beginning of growth, as potential begins to actualize itself. As an image of the universe, this is not the growth of one seed, but the growth of all seeds.
When we see a great tree in the middle of the woods, we are astonished by its age, by its ability to reach that size, but it is simply doing what all trees do: changing and growing.
When we see a great boulder in the midst of the woods, there is a mystery. We know now that they were moved slowly by glaciers over millennia. That sort of slow, aeonic movement is the subject of this card, as the whole universe was formed by impossibly slow movements of matter.
We may get excited by something like the “Big Bang”, which would be the Ace of Wands, but the movement and arrangement of the matter it produced was the endless and important task.
Let us zoom in to the scale of the anthropic! As it is Jupiter in Capricorn, fortune and material, I find this card often pertains to “Luck”, in the mundane sense. A Grimm’s Fairy Tale shows it well, the second story of Stories about Snakes in which a little girl meets a serpent with a crown who brings out treasures from its hole. She steals from the snake and it kills itself, the moral lesson being that she should have waited for it to bring out more of its treasure. That is bad luck!
This is the luck of finding a shiny penny on the street, a small token that found you through an endless process of universal formation. It is also the coin toss, choosing movement by way of random luck. Consider the killer in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, Anton Chigurh, who kills according to a coin toss. He rightly says "I got here the same way the coin did". The same movement that formed the Universe moves the coin.
When we pull Change, we can expect a little luck, alongside some movement and development in regards to our work. Remember the little coins we find with the luck of the Two of Disks will accumulate into the great wealth of the Ten of Disks!
