10 of Cups: Pisces III
Hermetic Title: Lord of Satiety
Decan ruler (Chaldean): Mars
Corresponding majors: The Tower (Mars) and The Moon (Pisces)
Dates: March 10 - March 19
At long last, we arrive at Pisces III, the "consummation devoutly to be wished". In my neighborhood, the snows have receded and the sap is running; each still-leafless maple bears a bucket, like an umbrella on a dandy's arm. At first glance, the 10 of Cups is a fairytale ending - the happy couple, their dancing children, the cozy home, the rainbow. But, as its associated majors imply, there is more to this idyll than meets the eye.
Chasing Rainbows
Mars rules this last decan of the zodiacal year. Because we have 7 planets and 36 faces (7 x 5 = 35 + 1), Mars also rules Aries I, the first decan of the zodiacal year. In effect, Mars bookends the year. I sometimes think of Pisces III as a curtain of mist, a waterfall through which we glimpse, hazily, the new year to come. And in the liminal space between watery Pisces and fiery Aries, we can expect things to happen. When the sun shines through rain, where fire and water meet, the rainbow arises - though it is never for long.
According to Waite, "it is contemplated in wonder and ecstasy by a man and woman below, evidently husband and wife...the two children dancing near them have not observed the prodigy but are happy after their own manner." In other words, he implies this is no mere meteorological phenomenon, but something out of the ordinary, even magical.
I've recently started thinking of the 8, 9, and 10 of Cups sequence as analogous to the Flood myth: 8 of Cups is the watery devastation, in which only the ark and its refugees are spared. 9 of Cups, the card of wishes, is Noah's act of hope: sending out the raven and the dove to search for land. And 10 of Cups is the safe deliverance of living creatures - sealed by God's covenant, whose signature is the miraculous (and not merely meteorological) rainbow.
Striking the Set at the Moonlight Theatre
The rainbow trope, I think, gives us an idea of how we might dig deeper than the surface bliss of the 10 of Cups - and how it relates to the Tower and the Moon. Like the rainbow, the vision of happiness in the 10 of Cups is just that - a vision. It's like the title card you see at the end of 1940's movies: "The End". It is the wedding at the end of the romantic comedy. But the Moon is the wellspring of illusions: perhaps the 10 of Cups' vision of perfect joy is pure lunar glamor; a temporary enchantment that will pass even as the moon waxes and wanes.
The couple and the children occupy what might well be a raised platform or a stage. Behind the curtain, the stagehands are already striking the set. The curtain falls, the false-fronted village collapses to the ground, the background scrim with its artful illusion of perspective crumples in a heap. The Tower strikes! and in retrospect, you knew it would all along.
Great Appetites and Fevered Dreams
Perhaps Mars' Tower is also responsible for the frenzied images passed down to us from the decan commentators: a shrieking woman standing in water, beset by spirits; a naked man crying an covered with serpents; another shouting from fear of thieves and fire, evil men and lustful women, and "great appetite" - which seems to cover everything from delight and marital intimacy to bestial acts. Like images glimpsed on the surface of a moonlit sea, these apparitions are literally dissolute. They aren't real - but then again, here at the Piscean end of all things, what is?
“Well, that’s one way to put it.” Different ideas of “delight” in the Astrolabium Planum and Liber T: Tarot of the Stars Eternal, whose 10 of Cups is the reason I don’t use the deck with clients.
What is real and what is not are questions always raised by the Moon. Although no one knows for sure, I've always thought the Moon's two towers were a portal to other realities, most obviously the world of dream. (They also bring to mind the gates of horn and ivory; the Odyssey tells us true dreams pass through the gates of horn, false ones through those of ivory. ) As Jean-Michel David points out in Reading the Marseille Tarot, the towers are the only sign of anything manmade in the card. Perhaps they signal the act of human construction, applied to creatures rising from the waters of the unconscious. It's not a bad definition for the act of dreaming.
If the Tower signifies the destruction of the ego, perhaps the Moon reveals what rises from its ashes. The 10 of Cups tells a story of dreams come true, or of an illusionary set ready to be struck. Both can be true, for only when we sail the floodwaters of the unconscious do we simultaneously create and destroy. Amidst the crumbling towers of dream, we have the power to refashion our waking reality.
The Pity of Prometheus
In his 36 Faces, Austin Coppock - a final shout-out to Austin! - notes that the Hellenistic fragment 36 Airs of the Zodiac attributes this decan to Elpis, the Greek personification of hope. This, perhaps, dates back to Aeschylus: in Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus tells us that Prometheus took pity on mankind, making us blind to μόρος ὄλεθρος, the knowledge of our own doom, and replacing it with ἐλπίς, the vision of hope. The 10 of Cups is that vision, and very sweet it is. But if we look more closely, we can catch a whiff of what lies behind it, including the debauched and overripe phantasms described previously.
The Rainbow Unwoven
But how closely do we really want to look? In the 17th century, Isaac Newton conducted his experiments on white light, splitting it into its prismatic colors. 150 years later, the poet John Keats - he whose name is writ on water - lightly lamented this scientific demystification of beauty - which he dubbed “unweaving the rainbow” - in his poem, Lamia.
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomèd mine—
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.
(Lamia, by the way, concerned itself with maidens glamored, bespelled, and revealed - as lunar a matter as you could wish for.)
Keats' point, I think, was that mystery is not only inevitable but essential to our well-being. The truth of the matter is that life is infinite and cyclical, so happy endings - or, indeed, tragic ones - are human constructions. Endings are artifices, painted scrims we use to bookend reality so that we can learn to love it, for a time.
How can one not be moved by the 10 of Cups' happy fiction, its daring work of the imagination? In a way, to create fiction and metaphor is the very point of being human - to connect this with that, and to share the artistry of the collective unconscious. We dwell between "Once upon a time" and "ever after". Nevertheless, our trajectory is circular. No sooner do we reach our destination than we are, in fact, once again at the origin.
Whether you see the 10 of Cups as a fantasy to fulfill, an illusion to shatter, or a parable of love and loss, depends on where you stand. Is the rainbow magical because of or despite its fleeting nature? Would you value it as highly if it were not doomed to vanish, even whilst dangling the illusion of hope before your eyes? And is the real truth - that this cycle of birth and death, love and loss, will repeat infinitely - any less hopeful than the perfect personal coda you thought you first glimpsed in its prismatic arc?
The Everyday 10 of Cups
Such lofty thoughts, however, are usually far away when I draw the 10 of Cups for myself. In real life it has brought me simple gifts: family reunions, meals taken together, special desserts, graduations, frisbee in the back yard with the kids, days of respite on the beach. These are the kind of rare days when I turn to my dear husband - as the card implies, he is usually right there in the picture at the time - and I say, "This is the life!"
Occasionally it comes up in capricious, literal ways, as tarot is wont to do. One day there were too many people at the pool (maximum cups!), so I had to forgo my own swim. On another rainy afternoon, I found myself strolling on the sidewalk behind a family of water fowl. They turned out to be mergansers who had lost their way; I later learned that my academic colleagues helped them find their way back to their pond. Who says that sweetness and light have vanished from this earth?!
Make way for ducklings! Interestingly, there were 9 of them in all, and my other card that day was the 9 of Cups.
The Takeaway
When you draw the 10 of Cups, chances are you will find something worth enjoying. If it doesn't happen spontaneously, it is in your power to make it so. We are in control of the narrative! If you choose the right endpoint, bliss can shimmer into view. Perhaps I'm worried about the meeting at 4:00 - but right now, on this street, I hear birdsong. I see the first tulip leaves thrusting their tips through the soil. I see a cloud shaped like a dolphin. By what undeserved good fortune have I arrived at this moment, in this single human life!
Even if you cannot rid yourself of the awareness that all perfection is fleeting, that only underscores the preciousness of the joy at hand. Hold it lightly, and let it pass. Tomorrow, we begin again.
CODA
With this post, I conclude the "Reading the Decans" series. During the course of this 36-part decan walk, my own life has seen more changes than most years. My son went to college. My daughter struggled with mood issues. Two geriatric cars bade us farewell, making way for a new all-electric vehicle. We re-financed our mortgage. My co-host Mel Meleen and I wrote, The Fortune's Wheelhouse Guide to Esoteric Tarot, which will eventually be published by Llewellyn. A dear friend of mine from my teenage years, whom I'd lost touch with, died suddenly; my uncle and another college friend succumbed to chronic diseases.
I began writing this at 37,000 feet, returning home from the Northwest Tarot Symposium after presenting a talk that has occupied a very large portion of my brain for the last two months. All around there is talk of the COVID-19 virus. Our family consists of two students and two teachers, and my school has already canceled class for the rest of the semester. Although life will go on, the mood worldwide is more apocalyptic than I’ve ever seen it before.
So much happens in a year, all of it of the utmost importance at the time. Yet five, ten years from now it will be a blur in the great sea of memory. I'll remember the spring afternoon in Taurus II when my friend Ivy and I stumbled across a beaver spine on our walk in the woods, and the hot Singapore sun in Leo III, and many cold dark mornings in Capricorn season, feeding the woodstove and praising Hestia, whose hymn I learned this year. I will remember it not by the calendar - and this I think is the lesson I take from my decan walk - but by the season; the feel of the breeze on my check, the scent of wood smoke, the cat sleeping in a warm south-facing window.
Sometimes I think that the linear progression of events in our lives is just one more illusion. As each event passes away from the bright spotlight of awareness, maybe it recedes into the endless spiral of decans and seasons. Maybe the specifics of our lives can only be known in aggregate by their rhythms and their climate, watched over by the benign and intemperate spirits that inhabit each face.
The discipline of writing every ten days was challenging, but not nearly so much as the meditations themselves. I'm of two minds as to whether meaning is made or discovered; both can surely be true - like the sculptures waiting in stone which Michelangelo said he merely freed. Each time I began thinking I had hardly anything to say; each time I concluded, thousands of words later, spent and schooled by the decans.
Although this was above all a personal rite of passage, I feel that the minor arcana in some sense longed to share their secrets. So, I plan to release the 36 essays as a self-published volume later in the year, after I've had a chance to refine them and edit for consistency. If you subscribe to this blog, you'll know when it becomes available.
Thank you, one and all, for joining me on this yearlong adventure.