Page of Cups.
An odd thing surfacing, met without embarrassment.
Upright, then reversed, as Waite gave them in 1910.
A blue cap, a tunic covered in pink blooms, and a cup held up with a fish leaning out of it. He is looking at the fish and the fish is looking back. Behind him, a band of flat waves.
He is the least defended figure in the suit. The old meanings are news, a message, a young person learning to feel, and the joke is that neither of them is alarmed. Something has surfaced in your cup this week, and the card's advice is to be as unbothered by it as he is.
Four things people go to on this card
- the fish
You went to the fish. Blue, small, leaning out over the rim of a drink it should not be in.
It came from underneath. You did not put it in the cup, you did not decide to have it, and it is faintly ridiculous and it is looking straight at you.
Ideas arrive like this and so do feelings about people, and the standard response is to pretend the cup is empty until the thing goes back down. The better move is to answer it. Nobody else has to know you are having the conversation, and it takes about a minute.
What has surfaced this week that you have been pretending is not in the cup?
- his hip
The free hand is where you stopped. On his hip, weight on one leg, entirely at ease with a fish in his drink.
He is not embarrassed. That is most of what makes this figure likeable, and it is the one thing he has that you do not, because embarrassment is learned later and learned reliably.
If you have had an idea this week that you have not mentioned because of how it would sound said out loud, this is the card for it, and the card is unmoved by how it would sound. Say it badly to one person. Badly is fine. Unsaid is what kills these.
What have you not said out loud yet because of how it would sound?
- the sea
You went past him to the water. It runs in a flat band behind him and there is a great deal more of it than there is of him.
He is holding one cupful and the rest is at his back. That is the workable amount. Feeling arrives in the size of an ocean and can only be handled in the size of a cup, and the mistake is to treat the whole sea as today's business because you can see it from where you are standing.
Take the portion. The rest is not for this afternoon, and treating it as though it were is how people drown in a mood that would have passed by Thursday.
What are you carrying a whole sea of when one cup would do for today?
- his tunic
The clothes are what you noticed. Pink blooms all over them, and the least practical outfit anybody in this suit is wearing.
He has dressed so that you can tell. That is a choice, and a young one, and it costs something at some point, usually in a room where somebody decides what you are on the basis of the flowers.
Most people pick up armour after that and never take it off again. Ask whether you are still willing to be that legible to strangers, and whether what you traded it for was worth the trade. The fish does not surface for people in armour.
What did being that legible cost you, and would you pay it again?
On the Tree of Life, Book T puts the Page of Cups on Malkuth, the kingdom, in Briah, the world of water: the pages of all four suits sit there, one to a world. It is the tenth place in the Tree of Life spread.
Which zodiac sign is the Page of Cups?
None, and that is the answer Book T gives. The Kings, Queens and Knights each hold thirty degrees of the zodiac, but the four Pages are given a quarter of the heavens around the pole instead, so the Page of Cups has no sign and no dates. What it does have is the whole of Cups under it: it is the earth of that suit, and on the Tree of Life it sits on Malkuth, the kingdom. A birthday cannot land on a Page.
Draw a card, and if this one turns, press whichever of these four you went to and the reading is written from there instead. Pulled it in a spread of your own? Read the whole spread here.
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