Image description: A hand is holding a Tarot card, Four of Cups, or Luxury from the Thoth Tarot. In the image, water is pouring into four golden cups that are arranged in two levels from a red lotus flower. Water is everywhere. The cups are golden, and the Cancer symbol is at the bottom of the image.
About five years ago a friend from my yoga studio in Fishtown gave me a used copy of the Thoth Tarot which I knew nothing about and wanted little to do with as is sometimes the case with me, when new things are offered and I believe I’m just fine right here in my zone of comforts, thanks anyway.
I brought the deck to Tarot Circle—the peer support space we used to hold in West Philly—as I often did with extra decks as loaners for newcomers. I remember making an offhand, unfounded and sort of pejorative remark about what a bizarre object the Thoth deck was. And when someone in the group said they were surprised to know I had no knowledge of or connection with it, I think that was the beginning of my becoming interested.
It’s been a while since I’ve had a regular practice of pulling cards daily or looking up other people’s meanings in any serious way. This week, I’ve been drawing two cards each morning, and am using the Thoth deck because that’s what happened to be in my nightstand.
Lady Freida Harris’ images in the Thoth deck are really different from Pamela Colman Smith’s in the Rider-Waite-Smith. And while I’ve worked with the cards long enough that I have thick histories with all of them, and can usually get a lot from pulling and doing free associations, there’s a lot in Thoth that’s beyond me.
Yesterday I pulled Four of Cups—which is called “Luxury” in Thoth—and because it made so little sense, I decided to spend some time digging into some of the interpretations that come up in a Google search. (I’ve linked to the websites I used in the body of this post).
Here’s a bit of what I gathered, and where it led me:
Four of Cups validates the luxury of inner peace and emotional stability while at the same time signifying that change and the development of new processes—which is often disruptive—is essential.
Though often a source of great anxiety, without a willingness to participate in change we becomes stagnant. This instinct toward safety is one that deserves infinite grace, but we’re wise to also remember: Water that stands still too long becomes a source of sickness.
The four, which connotes authority and stability, in the cups suit signifies stability of emotion. Considering standing water, it is easy to see how this instinct toward stability, while perhaps good-natured and protective, has a restrictive and damning element that cuts-off the movement that differentiates the living from the dead.
One of my favorite lines—which is oddly included in multiple sources online without attribution to an original source—says “Feeling stagnated, longing for change, the heart ponders its options, as it should.”
In Pamela Colman Smith’s Four of Cups, a person is seated under a tree gazing at three cups in front of them. When I imagine the significance of sitting under a tree, right up against its trunk, I imagine that feeling of security in something that is fixed and unmovable as a great Oak, maybe, or a Sycamore.
The person has their arms folded across their chest, which seems to suggest that they’re not receptive to that fourth cup, which is being offered to them, as if from the ethers. It is an opportunity: Say yes to change with grace and gratitude, or continue to refuse it, at your peril.
I’m thinking about one of my favorite and often cited passages from Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman’s work on the way people make meaning of their circumstances after a significant rupture has occurred. The ideal style of meaning-making after traumatic rupture for Watkins and Shulman, is what they call narratives of participation, which is characterized by trial and error, flexibility and openness to change.
While many understandably seek to renormalize after a rupture—to return to the way things were as quickly and completely as possible—others might develop fatalistic views of the world that are rooted in helplessness and mistrust. Narratives of participation do something quite different, which is the direction Four of Cups points a way toward, for me.
Times of emotional stability are luxuries. Beautiful mercies, not to be taken for granted. They offer respite from the flow of unrelenting change, which is a far more accurate reflection of the way life is than anything.