Ten of Cups.
The good life, shown to you from behind.
Upright, then reversed, as Waite gave them in 1910.
Ten cups arc across the sky in a rainbow. A man and a woman stand with their backs to you, his arm round her waist, their free arms raised. Two children dance to one side. Across a stream, a house with a red roof.
You are behind them. Contentment, family, the thing having worked, and the card has put you at a distance from it, across a stream, with nobody's face turned your way. What you feel from back here is the actual reading.
Four things people go to on this card
- the rainbow
You went to the rainbow. Ten cups arranged across the sky, and not one of them in anybody's hand.
A rainbow cannot be gripped. It depends on where you are standing and on the light, it is completely real while it lasts, and it ends without anybody doing anything wrong.
That is happiness as a condition rather than a possession, which is the whole of the old warning attached to this card. You cannot put it in a cupboard for later. What you can do is stand in the right place while it is up, and that is the thing you keep deferring until the week is quieter.
It is weather, not a possession. What would you do differently if you took that seriously today?
- the children
The children caught you. Two of them, off to one side, holding hands and turning, not looking at the sky at all.
They will never see the rainbow because they have never been without it. That is what an achievement becomes within one generation: the weather somebody grew up in, unremarkable, not worth looking up at. It is not ingratitude in them. It is the point of the work.
Somebody built the calm you are standing in and mostly did not tell you what it cost. Somebody is standing in a calm you built and does not know it was built. Both of those are worth a minute today.
Who is standing in a calm you built, and do they know it was built?
- the couple
Their backs are what you noticed. Both adults are turned away, arms up, faces not shown.
Their faces are the one thing this card keeps back, and faces are how people normally check whether a scene is as good as it looks. Without them you are left with your own reaction, which is the more useful instrument anyway.
Envy and recognition look almost identical from this angle. The quickest test is not analytical: notice whether you want to walk into the frame or out of the room. Answer fast. The first answer is the real one and the second is the one you have prepared for company.
Answer before you have time to think about it: do you want to join them or leave?
- the house
You went across the water to the house. Trees, a red roof, a stream between it and the people.
The rainbow is the feeling and the house is the arrangement. One of them arrives and the other is maintained: a roof, a rota, a standing order, a Tuesday in February when nobody feels anything in particular.
The card puts both in the same frame and does not rank them. Ask which of the two you have actually been working on this year. People who want the rainbow tend to let the roof go, people who are good at roofs forget to look up, and both of those are how it ends.
Rainbow or roof: which one have you actually been working on?
Its ten degrees
The Golden Dawn gave the Ten of Cups 20° to 30° of Pisces, ruled by Mars, and Book T calls it the Lord of Perfected Success. The Sun is in it from 10 March to 20 March. The decan page for this card.
The wheel runs on from here. The decan before this one is Nine of Cups, Jupiter in Pisces, 28 February to 10 March. The one after is Two of Wands, Mars in Aries, 20 March to 30 March. All thirty-six, in order.
On the Tree of Life, Book T puts the Ten of Cups on Malkuth, the kingdom, in Briah, the world of water: every ten is Malkuth, in its own suit's world. It is the tenth place in the Tree of Life spread.
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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