Welcome dear reader,

I write this as the Moon has just entered Aries, approaching its fullness within hours. For me personally, this lunation activates the 12th house, which is the place of prisons, the unseen, foreign countries, enmities, sorrows and slanderings, but no matter if this Aries moon is illuminating another house of your natal chart, Aries brings forth the card of dominion within the Two of Wands across the board.

Dominion determines supreme authority and by the card it depicts an imperial oversight, or what Nichloas Mirzoeff explores as visuality.

Towering above the State and its citizens, subjects, slaves and savages is the sovereign who sees and proclaims the sole right to see.

The Two of Wands is card of cartography, for it is imperial sight that maps, or visualizes, empire. Should you examine the rest of the Wands suit, and you will see a royal wedding, a soldier, a common laborer, weapons of war, a war general triumphing after a pronounced contest for power. The Two of Wands depicts the ruling class, and with its monarchical visages, their gaze refers to a visuality that sustains and certifies a centralized, autocratic leadership as it focuses on the formation of a coherent, intelligible picture of modernity, that is the globe that easily fits into their palm. That autocratic authority assumes it can easily hold, or perceive this whole globe, and thus culture and thus history. And in depicting or visualizing themselves as such they authorize their exclusive claim to be able to look.

The Twelfth House is a dark, shaded house in that it is averted from the ascendant and yet the Two of Wands is all about seeing. This is not paradoxical. It’s a function of design, a manner of relation established by carceral consciousness, that teaches inmates to be self-surveilling even as they are imprisoned and disappeared from public view. The human visual experience is a fundamentally political domain. Visuality not only sutures authority to power, it is self-justifying in making this power seem self-evident. Its devices render this association natural.

In the card the newly crowned King is examining the reach of their rule, which becomes as far their eye can see. And as they visualize their authority, culture and history, sight becomes a marker of civilization for the “civilized” could visualize, whereas the “primitive” was black and blind in the chaos of anarchy, the anthesis of “culture.” Yet the hallmark of the modern is in the manifested visualization of the ‘primitive.’1