Sweet Twilight- 8 of Swords

Hemera

Often in the Eight of Swords (RWS) the girl is tied and blindfolded but she can free herself if she just gathers some courage. In many traditional RWS cards the bonds that tie her are her own fears. Here they are perhaps something else -but what?

This girl is *really* tied and it doesn´t look like she could free herself even if she tried, does it? She is like the LWB says "trapped and powerless without a single option". All she can do here is wait for someone to come and rescue her. Will it be a knight in shining armour from the castle above? Or maybe the one who bound her was someone from that castle? It looks like dawn is near, though. The lovely green fields are glowing in the first rays of the sun. Maybe something will soon happen to set her free? Unless the vultures come first? :bugeyed:
 

RiccardoLS

A sacrifice cames to my mind.
No dragon could ever pass a tasty redhead. :)
But she is no victim, isn't she? Victim don't bear swords.

You say that in the RWS one need courage to break away?
Here, it may be she has found the courage not to flee.
 

Aerin

She is physically bound but I don't think her mind is bound.
 

frac_ture

As Hemera said way back when starting this thread, the 8 of Swords in the RWS deck shows a woman bound and blindfolded, but in such a way that if she only mustered up her courage and made the effort, she could most likely use the swords that surround her to sever her bonds and set herself free. It's more her own fear and indecision that keep her imprisoned, than it is her bonds and the swords.

The Sweet Twilight's 8 of Swords plays a variation on that theme. It's impossible to tell if the woman at the center of this card is blindfolded, but she's certainly bound -- and here, it's by chains, not strips of cloth or rope, or anything else that might be dispatched with a sword. And that's significant, because unlike the woman in the RWS version of this card, this woman still has her own sword hanging from her hips. This actually makes me think that the story here is a bit different -- while the RWS' character looks like she's been made somebody else's captive, the woman in the Sweet Twilight 8 of Swords actually doesn't. As Riccardo said upthread, victims don't bear swords. If this woman were somebody's prisoner, wouldn't they have disarmed her?

That idea, plus the fact that four of the other swords in the picture have been driven into the vertical surface running up alongside her, make me think that she herself actually stuck those swords into place so she could use them as a makeshift stepladder to reach those hanging chains and lock herself into them (and the chains are the red color of rust, indicating they're possibly well-known fixtures that have been hanging there in view of the castle and exposed to the elements for quite some time). I get the impression that this woman locked herself in this place in order to ensure that she'll now go through some sort of ordeal, some trial, and once locked in firmly, there's no way out until the trial has been faced. She reminds me a bit of Andromeda, the princess in Greek mythology who was chained to a rock above the ocean, and was to be sacrificed to a sea monster -- but the differences here are that 1) Andromeda was much more of a victim, and 2) she had to be saved by the hero Perseus. The woman in this card, on the other hand, doesn't seem so helpless, and she doesn't look like the type to need saving. I believe she's locked herself on a course that will be dangerous, but she's committed to it, and she might well have the tools needed to survive. She's about to find out if that's the case, and it was her choice to do so.

To me, the RWS 8 of Swords says, "You could release yourself and deal with things, but you're not doing so"...the Sweet Twilight 8 of Swords says, "You might consider putting yourself in a position where you no longer can release yourself so that you'll be forced to deal with things."