8 of Cups: Pisces I
Hermetic Title: Indolence/ Abandoned Success
Decan ruler (Chaldean): Saturn
Corresponding majors: The World (Saturn) and The Moon (Pisces)
Dates: February 19 - February 28
It's like a scene from a storybook: a red-cloaked figure, staff in hand, climbs a rocky shoreline beneath a watchful moon. Their destination is unclear, but we know what sacrifice they leave behind: 8 cups full of the past; 8 cups worth of life lessons and experiences. These are the moonlit seas of Pisces - a final liquid dissolution under cover of night. Here in the final three decans of our yearlong journey, we take the mystic's path and arrive at the sea at the end of the known. By forsaking the familiar, the accounted-for, even the rational! we shall encounter magic and mysteries.
Inside and Outside the Walls
The 8 of Cups represents the first decan of Pisces, a decan ruled by Saturn - the last one we shall see. In fact, for the last six decans, we have been in Saturn territory by sign: the 2, 3, and 4 of Pentacles were cards of Capricorn [The Devil], while the 5, 6, and 7 of Swords were cards of Aquarius [The Star]. In the Devil's decans, we worked within the world's walls and followed its rules. In the Star's decans, we stepped into the starry space outside those walls and rules in order to reimagine them. (For interesting cyclical reasons, this 70-day sequence begins with a Jupiter-ruled decan in a Saturn-ruled sign, and ends with a Saturn-ruled decan in a Jupiter-ruled sign.)
Those Capricorn and Aquarius sign cards told us something about Saturn's chthonic and celestial kingdoms. But the five decans of Saturn afford us the chance to take his gifts "on the road," as it were, and see what we can make of ourselves with their assistance. The 7 of Pentacles taught us to find patience; the 5 of Wands, to perform under pressure. The 3 of Swords taught us to honor our commitments; the 10 of Wands to bear our burdens. The 8 of Cups teaches us perhaps the hardest lesson of all: to face our fear of the unknown.
Dreaming in Darkness
Of the last three cards on our decan walk, all of which correspond to The Moon, it is the 8 of Cups which best illustrates the moon's special province: dream. In dreaming, we cross the liminal space between conscious and unconscious. In the language of dream (for a great many of us at least), the unconscious is represented by water: seas, pools, rain. In the Moon card, a crawfish rises from the sea; in the 8 of Cups, our hero traverses its edge. Both highlight the very fringe of what can be grasped by the mind; as Austin Coppock puts it in my favorite essay in 36 Faces, it's "the convergence point of perception and reality"; as for the journey he describes it as a "quest to map the invisible walls of reality". In the World card's iconography, we can think of the dancer as the bared soul, safe within the body's dream-paralysis, exploring its own frontiers and seeking to know itself.
Detail from the 1971 cover art for A Wizard of Earthsea
According to Jung, those who seek wisdom turn a friendly face to the unconscious: "The unconscious shows us the face that we turn towards it. It smiles if we are friendly to it; but if we neglect it, it makes faces at us." (- Conversations with C.G. Jung). It is brave work to look in the Moon's face! Ursula LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea, it is only when Ged the Mage turns to face his shadow that his wholeness may be restored. (The title of this blog post is a tribute to that series.)
I read A Wizard of Earthsea when I was 11 or so, and that image never left me. For much of my life, I suffered recurring dreams of being chased by an unknown figure of fright; I would wake, heart racing, at the moment of capture. But around age 40, something happened in one of those dreams. I stopped, mid-flight and, despite my abject terror, slowly turned around to face my pursuer - who turned out to be a perfectly ordinary-looking person, a schlemiel, with a completely forgettable face. What! Do! You! Want!!! I shouted at him. He shrugged. "I don't know." And he turned and walked away. I'm not sure what it says about the state of my unconscious, but I never had that dream again.
In the Mythic Tarot, 8 of Cups is Persephone’s descent.
In the 8 of Cups, a portentous moon hangs over the rocky slope. Actually - if you look at the outline - it might be a luminary in eclipse. Is it a solar eclipse, where the full moon turns the day to darkness? Or is it a lunar eclipse, where our shadow occludes the moon itself? In either case, sun and moon are implicated. Sometimes when I think of this card, I think of lucid dreaming, in which the light of consciousness (the sun) awakens in the kingdom of the unconscious (the moon).
Nowadays, I have a nightly ritual practice: I descend into the Dreaming down a rocky slope of my own, chanting the Hymns to Hypnos and Oneiros. In my mind's eye, it doesn't look like the scene in the 8 of Cups. But it feels exactly the same, and that is the point.
Dark Night of the Soul
What exactly do people mean by that - the "dark night of the soul"? Sometimes folks use it to indicate a crisis of consciousness, as in "Mitt Romney underwent a dark night of the soul before finally tendering his Yes vote on Article 1 in the impeachment trial." Sometimes it just means a really, really tough time somebody's having.
But originally, the phrase derives from a beautiful work of Christian mysticism, the 16th-century Noche Oscura, by San Juan de la Cruz (St John of the Cross). Like the Bible's Song of Solomon, it's a love song that is also a song about divine adoration, or vice versa. I first ran across it when researching the 8 of Cups for Fortune's Wheelhouse and was immediately taken with its lyrical intimacy. Here's an excerpt:
In the dark, concealed,
Down the secret ladder, disguised in other clothes,
(O coming of delight!)
In shadows and in ambush,
When all my house lay long in deep repose.
And in the joyous night
In secret places where none saw me
And I saw nothing
Without light or guide
Except the heart that lit me from inside.
A oscuras y segura,
por la secreta escala, disfrazada,
¡oh dichosa ventura!
a oscuras y en celada,
estando ya mi casa sosegada.
En la noche dichosa,
en secreto, que nadie me veía
ni yo miraba cosa,
sin otra luz y guía|
sino la que en el corazón ardía.
The imagery effortlessly evokes the 8 of Cups - the secret climb, the disguise, the voyage through the dark, the sleeping house left behind (here represented by the 8 cups). But this 'dark night of the soul' is an ordeal of purification, not torment. It's a stripping away, a leaving behind of what one once knew, in order to gain something much more precious. It's an escape from, but also a journey toward.
The 1888 “Flammarion engraving”.
The Hanged Man's Secret
In esoteric tarot, the Hanged Man card correlates to elemental water - which means that the suit of water, cups, has a special relationship with Arcanum XII. In her Tabula Mundi deck, Mel Meleen equates the Hanged Man with Odin, and ever since encountering that I've become fascinated with the way the Odin archetype refracts and coheres in the 2 through 10 of Cups.
from Tabula Mundi Colores Arcus, by M. M. Meleen
There are, of course, many myths of Odin, but the one that applies here is the one known as Odin's Rune Song. Mimír, wisest of gods, was slain, but Odin placed his head in the well-waters beneath the roots of Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life. In order to gain Mimír's wisdom, Odin sacrificed "himself to himself"- hanging upside down on Yggdrasil, sacrificing his own eye to the well, impaling himself on his own lance - for nine days. In return, he received the runes - no mere alphabet, but magical, powerful sigils of transformation.
If we consider the three watery zodiacal majors - the Chariot, Death, and the Moon - we can see the bare bones of this narrative:
1. The Quest - Chariot
2. The Sacrifice - Death
3. The Mystic Reward - Moon
I spoke a bit about Odin's self-sacrifice way back in Scorpio I, but here in the Moon's decans, our concern is what I'm calling the "Mystic Reward" - the secrets of magic, the altered consciousness, the door to another realm. The Moon has always been a touchstone of magic; in this story, it signifies wisdom only accessible when you set aside ("sacrifice") logic, reason, and daylight's specificity. Perhaps this is why, in tarot, The Hermit (Virgo) and the Moon (Pisces) stand opposite to one another. The Hermit asks the Moon for its secrets. The Moon asks the Hermit to forsake the familiar.
[The Hermit and the Moon also bring to mind the mysteries of numbers 9 and 18. Nine were the days Odin hung on the Tree. Eighteen were the spells he enumerates in the "Song of Spells," which immediately follows the Rune Song in the Hávamál.]
And - in case you want proof of just how lunar the myth of Odin's hanging is - consider these words from the Hávamál, uttered by Odin after his nine days of suspension.
Then made fertile I was,
and wise I became,
waxed and did well.
Not All Those who Wander are Lost
Odin has a superabundance of epithets; he is "the Wanderer," "the Hooded One," "the Masked One"; in folklore, unsuspecting ordinary folk often encounter him as an old man with a staff, a grey cloak, a worn hat, and an eyepatch. (And yes, it is as you suspected - Tolkien modeled his Gandalf on one of the guises of Odin; at least he spoke of Gandalf "as an Odinic wanderer".)
The wanderer appears not just in all variations of the 8 of Cups, but in Agrippa's image of its corresponding decan: "a man carrying a burden over his back, and dressed well." Its significations, he adds, are anxietatis, cogitationum multatum, itinerum, mutandi se de loco ad locum, inquirendi substantiam et victu: anxiety, many thoughts, journeys, going from place to place, seeking substance and nourishment.
Here in the last ocean, the fish can never stop swimming - but at least they swim in the seas of wisdom itself.
The Everyday 8 of Cups
In the past, I have had an uncommonly high incidence of drawing the 8 of Cups on Thursdays - day of Jupiter - when the hour of Saturn often worked out to be the exact time I had available to go for a swim. It's gone along with tasks involving removing someone or something from a situation where they no longer belonged, emotional difficult cleaning chores, and discussions of non-ordinary realities. In one very specific and weird instance, it turned up the day I went to get a retina check in my left eye and ended up undergoing laser surgery (eclipses = eye afflictions; this was right after the Great American Eclipse opposed my moon to the degree. Moon = left eye.)
In readings, I've found it's one of those cards clients greet with a sigh of recognition. It usually turns up when folks are truly, deeply, profoundly Ready To Walk.
The Takeaway
A little like the 5 of Pentacles, the 8 of Cups can be a place of great uncertainty and doubt. This is only a problem if you're committed to following the plan at all costs. If you can, take a step back, leaving behind eight cups' worth of past assumptions. Imagine you are floating in the sea of the whole universe as your problem (whatever it is) diminishes to a tiny point and then - pop! - extinguishes itself.
In the amniotic darkness, let go of the fear that anything could happen, and open up to wonder and to awe: indeed, anything could happen!
Excerpt from Hávamál (translation by W. H. Auden and P. B. Taylor)
Wounded I hung on a wind-swept gallows
For nine long nights,
Pierced by a spear, pledged to Odhinn,
Offered, myself to myself
The wisest know not from whence spring
The roots of that ancient rood
They gave me no bread,
They gave me no mead,
I looked down;
with a loud cry
I took up runes;
from that tree I fell.
Nine lays of power
I learned from the famous Bolthor, Bestla' s father:
He poured me a draught of precious mead,
Mixed with magic Odrerir.
Waxed and throve well;
Word from word gave words to me,
Deed from deed gave deeds to me,
Runes you will find, and readable staves,
Very strong staves,
Very stout staves,
Staves that Bolthor stained,
Made by mighty powers,
Graven by the prophetic god,
For the gods by Odhinn, for the elves by Dain,
By Dvalin, too, for the dwarves,
By Asvid for the hateful giants,
And some I carved myself:
Thund, before man was made, scratched them,
Who rose first, fell thereafter
Know how to cut them, know how to read them,
Know how to stain them, know how to prove them,
Know how to evoke them, know how to score them,
Know how to send them, know how to destroy them.