The Tarot Year: March 10-20

the decan – what does the 10 of cups mean in tarot ?

the X of cups is the final Pisces decan, covering March 10-20 – and the final decan of the Tarot Year. this is blog post 36 and I’ll be taking a break for a wee while before returning with a sequence of blogs on the Major Arcana. in that I will develop the ideas I found in this process – in an attempt to look with fresh eyes at the idea of the Fool’s Journey, and its relationship with time and tarot.

the X is called Perfected Success – and represents Mars in Pisces. there’s a delightful connection here with that famous expression “beware the ides of March” (which are on the 15th). this is when Julius Caesar was murdered, and we might imagine that as the result of aggressive Mars meeting chaotic Pisces.

no-one is getting stabbed in the back in this Tarot, though, because what Mars actually brings to Pisces is a powerful focus – the kind of energy that can make even our wildest dreams come true. but who knows what this energy might mean for the sickening violence and threats dominating our news, and their perpetrators.

what does the Queen of cups mean in tarot?

the card I drew to read this decan is the Queen of cups – and if the X shows us the result of properly focusing our emotional energies – the Queen shows us how to get there.

working from our environment, maintaining healthy boundaries, attention to detail, unwavering focus, and – most importantly – remember we can accomplish anything if we have tapped into our deepest, most divine purpose.

and how do we do that? by working with feeling. and that’s a problem of course because we are taught that emotion is dangerous, untrustworthy, irrational, imbalanced, and has to be kept down or dismissed.

horseshit, I say. emotions change, true, but when we live from emotion we connect with the flow of divine energy through us – and that’s when we tap into energies beyond our comprehension, the energies that move mountains seemingly by magic or miracle.

thinking about what next?

worried about what comes after you reach your goals?

afraid of your own power? (don’t be!)

visit my readings page to book a reading or drop me a message online!

the advice

the better your boundaries the less you will fear

every moment we live in the present is blessed

the cup and its contents are one and the same

when we open our hearts, we step closer to the divine

you create what your heart can hold

nothing happens lest it first exists in your heart

feeling is our connection to the divine

a humane heart is the only magic wand you’ll ever need

forget “To be or not to be”– “Boys don’t cry” – that is the problem

vessels are made so things can be moved not just so they can be stored

rethink ‘effort’ and ‘worth’

get into your heart and the rest of you will follow

and then? “Just keep the car in the road” D. Parton

the symbols

cups are ordinary – we use them without thinking, all the time, every day – and yet they are infinite in variety. in these two cards we see some of that range, and some of that specialness – but these are not everyday cups, let’s face it.

in the X we have cups held in the sky by the rainbow, a powerful symbol of divine presence, communication, and connection in many cultures. in Nordic tradition, the rainbow bridge of the Bifrost provides the way to Asgard, and for the Greeks it was the symbol of Iris, a messenger of the gods.

the rainbow was also the sign chosen by Jehovah as his covenant with the assembly of human and animal kind on the Ark that he would never again destroy the world with water in the form of floods. with what we now know about global warming, let’s hope that deal still stands.

what the cups in the X represent is, therefore, the divine blessing of an enduring order. this card isn’t so much about material wealth or accumulation, as it is about true riches – peace, harmony, safety. when the world is in chaos we are out of step with the divine and no-one can truly be happy.

in the Queen we have the most unique cup in all of the Tarot – the result of painstaking attention to detail, the fruit of individual imagination, and of feeling focused with mature femininity. the X shows us results of harnessing feeling (Pisces energy) with directed focus (Mars energy) – and the Queen tells us how to pull this off.

she is inseparable from her environment, and therefore supported by it. she sits at the shoreline, both aware of flux and maintaining her position, and therefore supported by positive boundaries. she is undistracted, and has a sole task, and her unwavering focus leads to her unique creation.

such focus allows her to attend to both detail and structure. this kind of work expresses our divine purpose by expressing our true selves, and in that, it brings us closer to those divine cups shown in the X.

the cup is worth considering as a symbol. at a base level, it is simply a container. you can rest things on pentacles – you can cut things with swords – or you can set them on fire with the kindling of wands. of course, these suits all have their inner aspect as well.

but the cups express external and internal reality at the same time. we can imagine them as the Grail – the external cup – bearing the divine essence – the inner reality. but the point is they are the most complex symbol amongst the suits because they have this dual nature.

cups represent the womb from which we are born. they represent the shape we give to feeling. on one level they represent anything formless coming into form, and so into being. love, creativity, empathy, compassion – our feelings, attitudes, and attitudes – everything that defines the inner atlas of the human and what can only be known when it is expressed in some form – all these things belong to cups.

the body itself is a series of ‘cups,’ or containers – the skull contains our minds, and thoughts – our hearts hold our feelings – our stomachs hold our desires – the bowl of the pelvis holds our genitals, and so sex, and reproduction.

thought, feeling, desire, sex – these are all aspects of our lives which easily fall into imbalance. an understanding of cups as containers that hold the balance, in many areas, allows us to see what happens when our energy is not focused, or ‘spilled.’

we can further see the significance of cups by thinking about the role of Briah – the realm of water, feeling, and creativity – on the Tree of Life. as divine energy moves down from the realm of fire, Atziluth, it becomes more complex.

the symbol of cups tells us the realm of water must impose the first rule of concrete existence – that of energetic integrity. this is the aspect of cups as containers. but they must also hold and channel the divine spark – that is what cups contain, in all its forms.

the container cannot be separated from what it contains – the vessel is also the thing it transports. which is to say, cups are not only sacred but also represent the beginning of physical reality – in terms of the division of all things into consciousness and matter – as well as the unity of physical and divine reality.

the primary nature of physical reality (if you accept this narrative) is, therefore, emotion. it is above and before thought, which is secondary to it, only ever seeking to articulate that which is first felt. thought is not the result or cause of action, feeling is – for nothing happens lest it first exists in the heart.

this is why the idea of ‘manifestation’ is problematic. you can manifest anything – sure – it’s possible. but the truth is only those things your heart can hold truly belong to you and come to you with ease.

and the things we desire are set by consumerism, and all too often, by greed. by our guts, not by our hearts. we have to get in tune with feeling if we are really going to do anything of meaning.

we have a culture that loves to think. but we are afraid of feeling. it overwhelms us, destroys us, even, and we can’t cope when people express emotion and all too often are embarrassed to either express or to witness it ourselves.

but in this narrative, we are closer to the divine when we open our hearts. in truly expressed emotion we see the power of the divine, and it is awesome.

we shame people for feeling. women, especially, are shamed for being angry. but men are also shamed for showing emotion, particularly pain, as it is expressed by crying. boys don’t cry. to cry is to admit weakness by admitting one has been hurt, which is to admit another has power over us.

learning the ability to oppress our pain until it poisons us is the big problem at the heart of history – which is, after all, a long sequence of events in which largely male leaders refuse to have feelings about anything and prefer to wreak destruction on the world rather than shell out for therapy.

but until we come to terms with the nature of things – that everything is part of divinity, that we are in the totality of the divine – and that our first and most powerful intelligence and connection to the divine is feeling – we will always be lost, in our heads, searching for the thing that’s in our hearts, and before our eyes.

beneath the surface

just a quick note on the colouring of the cards, contrasting the original and the re-coloured version. you’ll notice that nearly all of the figures in the RWS are Caucasian, but in the original version, for example, we could look at the man in the V pentacles, and the children in the X of cups and say they represent persons of colour.

Pamela Colman Smith was of mixed race, and I wonder if the very different skin tones of the hands of the adults in the X represent her own parents in the abstract.

the RWS is of its time and was never going to be a multi-cultural deck, but little inflections like this maybe reflect her awareness of how mono-ethnic the project was. given the artist, it would be bizarre if there were no persons of colour in the RWS.

perhaps she reserved this most glorious image of happiness as a symbol of her own family. perhaps that’s why it’s a little bit depressing that these figures appear to be whitewashed in the recoloured version – where there is no hint of the global family at all.

astrologically speaking, it’s the direction Mars gives Pisces that’s the key. the two fish of the Pisces glyph pull away from each other – reflecting the story of Aphrodite and Eros transforming themselves into fish and tied together by silver thread so they wouldn’t be lost to each other in fleeing their pursuers.

but the Mars glyph is the circle of the world in harmony led by an arrow in a clear direction – onwards and upwards. representing Cancer in the Minor Arcana, the Queen has the properties of being able to direct the fluid energy of cups with similar purpose – and that theme of containing energy again appears in the Knight of cups, Scorpio – ruled by Mars in the old astrology.

with the X’s placed on sephiroth 10, Malkuth-Earth, we might envisage a happy ending – but Mars is a hot, fiery energy – the energy needed for breakthroughs and beginnings.

I prefer to see the X of cups as a happy beginning – the successful use of divine intention and heartfelt emotion creating the energy needed to direct reality according to Will. the humane heart is the only magic wand we need.

doors are opening, doors are closing – as the song goes. after this, we are at the start of a new Tarot Year, transitioning from the X of cups to the II of wands – Dominion, and Mars in Aries.

if you ever wondered why March in particular was named after this deity by the Romans, well now you know.

for as much as we’d like, we can’t stay here. Dominion shows us that – even when we have the whole world in our hands – we are hungry, desiring creatures, always looking for our next challenge, our next level.

so few of us are happy when we get what we want, let’s face it. the drive and desire that has been our constant companion – once satiated – disappears. but often it takes so long to get where we want to be – we feel like we’ve lost part of ourselves when we get there.

and so the cycle goes on, and our confusion never ends. we have to live our own lives, not the lives envisioned for us by a system of acquisition which can never be satisfied. what would it be like to reach a place and allow ourselves to rest, happy? what would it be like to feel like we had enough, that we were enough?

I guess that’s the alternative way I’ve been looking for in following the decans this year, and the way they map time across the Tarot – a path of spiritual path in the Tarot beyond divination and prophecy, and more of an almanac based in the cards themselves by which we can dwell peacefully in an enduring order of the divine on earth.

you’ll be pleased to hear that I’m still a million miles from that, and there are, I’m sure, many more better writers and students of Tarot whose ideas I will need to explore before I can truly say I’ve thought all this through.

I’ve deliberately avoided making this an overly studious process and tried to work from intuition more than intellect.

but up to this stage, it seems to me what needs to happen is a little separation between the Astrological Year – which is definitely reflected in the cards, of course – and the Tarot Year. not so much in terms of structure but in terms of the different wisdom they present. like I said, miles to go.

that said, one of the important things to come out of this year of blogging is very much to do with structure. I’ve divided the year into three sequences of Cardinal, Fixed, and Mutable.

Cardinal sequence: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer

Fixed sequence: Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio

Mutable sequence: Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces

this gives the year a somewhat different structure to the idea of the four agricultural seasons, bringing it closer to the idea of a Trinity, and closer to a narrative structure of beginning, middle, and end.

each of the sequences is named as such because each begins and ends with a Cardinal, Fixed, or Mutable sign. but they also contain the other two energies. for example the Fixed sequence of Leo to Scorpio, which are the Fixed signs of fire and water respectively, contains the Mutable earth of Virgo and the Cardinal air of Libra.

in this, the Tarot Year is less linear than the Astrological Year, because each sequence contains other energies, which it needs to transform – much like philosophy of yin and yang in the Taoist cosmology.

so each of these three sequences contains three energies, and what we have is the tripling of the Trinity – what Cooper calls “the Triple Triad” of 3×3: it is “completion, fulfilment, attainment, beginning and end, the whole, celestial and angelic number, the Earthly Paradise.”

perhaps the most important step in identifying this structure has been exploring the symbol of clouds in the Tarot. these are used in the swords cards as a metaphor of the mental state of the character in the card – particularly the Court cards, where they show a windswept Page, a Knight riding against the wind, a Queen detached as if on a bed of clouds, and a rather isolated King.

elsewhere in the suit clouds are used as a symbol of having one’s head in the clouds (II), painful emotions (III), a jagged pill to swallow (V) and mind fog (VIII).

I’m bracketing these out, however, to specifically explore those cards where there is a direct relationship of an object and a cloud – my suggestion is there’s a difference between cloud-as-metaphor and cloud-as-symbol, particularly because the hand emerging from a cloud has been a symbol of a gift from God almost since time immemorial, as in the Aces.

anyway, this is a rather long-winded way of saying each of the Cardinal, Fixed, and Mutable sequences ends with another cloud card, but, like the Aces, the ending of each sequence brings back the idea of a divine gift.

in the IV of cups (Moon in Cancer) we have the repeated image of the hand of God offering the gift. in the VII of cups (Venus in Scorpio) we have the appearance of divine gifts, but the excess of choice, and the possibility of illusion. here we must be guided by our own discernment. and in the X of cups (Mars in Pisces) we have the gift of the covenant, the enduring order of peace on earth, as shown by the ten cups merged with the symbol of the rainbow, which we of course perceive through the presence of mist – cloud, in other words.

when I return to the decans, and to blogging, I'll be exploring the Major Arcana and the potential significance of a similar sequence of cloud cards, and what might be gleaned from looking at it as an underlying structure.

0 The Fool starts that journey above cloud level, reaching the divine madness of touching the sun. there is more than a touch of yoni-lingam iconography in the connection of staff and sun, here. we could say the Fool shows us union with the divine through the ecstasy of orgasm, a bold, but random discovery – and one showing the need for a more structured path. perhaps that path is shown in the Majors – in the VI, X, and XXI we no longer see divine hands, but divine beings. it's a shift of gear, perhaps, but it echoes what's happening in the Minor Arcana, and that's where I'll start when I get back to this.

the significance of each sequence ending with an encounter with the divine – each of a different nature, of course – is that this is what truly marks the end of one cycle of energy, and the beginning of another. with these cards we have the opportunity to move on to a higher level of spiritual understanding.

this laying out of time according to a triple cycle of spiritual growth is, I think, unique to the Tarot, and what marks out the calendar laid out in the decans as distinctive from the astrological year, which is nevertheless embedded.

at this stage I’m not even going to attempt to propose a working structure by which we might weaponise our work by aligning ourselves with these energies at every step. more work is needed.

but where I’m going with this is the construction of a tripartite, ritual pagan calendar – somewhat different to, but including, those festivals we already know – using the Tarot as both structure and guidance. the aim?

to create a new path from the old

to find the symbols we need now, to help us find who we truly are, now

to live in magic and creativity, in step with the divine

to feel, and to be felt, to know, and to be known

to walk out of the prison rebuilt around us every day, and towards light

finally, coming out of all this is the idea of a year-long reading based on the decans. I’m going to do this at the start of Aries, and who knows, maybe I’ll share my experiences in a later post.

you will need two decks. they will spread out somewhat in a pyramid shape, so you’ll need quite a bit of floorspace.

calculate the overarching card of the year, for example 2+0+2+2 = 6, therefore VI The Lovers.

calculate your personal card of the year, for example 1+4+3+2+0+0+1 = 11, therefore XI Justice (trust your instincts – if you want to reduce this further to II The High Priestess go for it).

take these cards from the first deck and lay them out with enough space between them for three cards. shuffle that deck again and fill these three spaces with cards you select blindly, meditating on the title of each, as follows. the first spot is titled Creation, the second spot is titled Peace, the third spot is titled Chaos.

that should create a row of five cards at the top of the reading.

underneath that, you will have a row of 12 cards, each representing one of the zodiac signs, as follows:

underneath Creation choose cards to represent Aries, Taurus, Gemini, and Cancer.

underneath Peace choose cards to represent Leo, Virgo, Libra, and Scorpio

underneath Chaos choose cards to represent Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces

now take the second deck, and underneath each of the star signs lay out three cards – the three cards representing each of the decans for that sign. so Aries will be II, III, and IV of wands, Taurus will be V, VI, and VII of pentacles, Gemini will be VIII, IX, and X of swords, and Cancer will be II, III, and IV of cups – and so on.

now go back to the first deck, and contemplating the structure you have laid out, and what you know about the year ahead in your own life, choose a card to lay on top of each of the cards representing the decans.

you will need to make a record of the whole structure, because I doubt anyone has the space to leave this kind of spread lying around. photographs or notes, whatever floats your boat.

then, at the start of each decan, lay out the year card and your personal year card with four spaces between them. add in your chosen theme card (Creation, Peace, or Chaos), your chosen astrological card for the sign we are in, and the card of the decan – as well as the card you chose to go with it.

the six cards will act as a series of lenses – year, sequence, sign, decan – for you to use as a reading to work with during each of the decans.

if you decide to try this reading, I’d love it if you could share your experience with me! this is very much a prototype and I’d welcome any feedback.

thanks for reading – I should be back in the blogosphere later in the year – keep in touch via social media or the website!

with thanks to the decks and designers – the RWS of Pamela Colman Smith with Mary Hanson-Roberts, Chris-Anne's Muse and Lightseer Tarot, RuPaul’s Drag Race Tarot, Manara, Kim Krans's Wild Unknown Tarot, Siri Rose’s Cascadia Tarot, Elisa Poggese’s Sensual Wicca Tarot, Nicoletta Ceccoli’s Tarot, Antonella Platano’s Tarot of the 78 Doors, Jack Sephiroth’s Heaven and Earth Tarot, Marco Proietto’s Capobianco Nero Tarot, MJ Cullinane’s Crow Tarot, and Star Spinner Tarot by Trungles.