21 May to 20 June · Mutable Air · ruled by Mercury
The tarot cards of Gemini
Mutable air, and the sign of The Lovers.
Gemini is mutable air: two of everything, and a mind that would rather hold both than settle. The Lovers is the trump, and the card is far more Geminian than its modern romantic reading suggests. Waite's image is a choice being made under a watching figure, and the older versions are explicitly a man choosing between two women. It is a card about duality resolving into a decision.
Its decans are the late Swords, which is the bleakest run in the deck: the Eight bound and blindfolded, the Nine awake at three in the morning, the Ten face down with the swords in. Air overthinking itself. Gemini gets the sharpest illustration in tarot of what happens when a fast mind is left alone with a problem.
The trump
The Major Arcana card that carries the sign itself.
The three decans
Each sign covers thirty degrees, divided into three ten-degree decans. One numbered card each, and they run in order through the sign.
The court card
The figure who carries the sign. Court attributions vary more between traditions than any other part of this system, because the Golden Dawn courts straddle two signs rather than sitting inside one.
The other eleven signs
Where these attributions come from
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, in the late nineteenth century. They mapped the whole deck onto the zodiac, the planets and the Hebrew alphabet, and the Rider-Waite-Smith deck was built on that system, which is why most modern decks still inherit it.
It is a system rather than a discovery. The fifteenth century Italian decks had no astrological scheme at all, and other traditions map the cards differently. Every attribution on this site is the Golden Dawn one, and where a card is disputed its own page says so.
Gemini in an actual chart
This page is about what the tarot tradition attaches to Gemini. The astrology itself, calculated from real ephemeris data rather than described, is on our sister site.
Gemini on Memento Astra