In January, I drew and wrote about the Eight of Cups as the card of the year, discussing its lonely figure and shadowed wandering as a state of “neither too much hope, nor too much despair,” and embodiment as a lesson in moving forward, even if “movement” feels like nothing and “forward” does, too.
I am always ready to be done thinking about the Eight of Cups, and about the eights of the tarot, in general, which can be places of bleeding gums and boredom as you find yourself transformed into the very thing you’ve been set on fighting. This weekend, though, I returned to the Eight of Cups as the lunar eclipse in Scorpio perfected to a crescent red, uncannily resembling the suture scars underneath my breast flaps, which, in turn, look as if the surgeon molded my skin back together with pinch and fingernail rather than routine medical stitches. In the Waite-Smith tarot, the Eight of Cups is Pamela Colman Smith’s only card to include an image of an eclipse, and while, as an astrologer, I could regale you with hot takes about “the baleful rays” of our most recent one, the exhausted adjunct-lecturer-who-is-also-a-mother in me doesn’t really have time for that.
I’ve come to think of the Eight of Cups as one of the “mothering” cards of the tarot, I told a friend who has been repeatedly drawing its despondent energies into her life over the course of the collaborative decan walk we’ve embarked on together this year. She mentioned that the card feels like “Big Failure” energy to her, which got me thinking about the particular way that Eight of Cups failure shows up in my life these days—which is in this wanting feeling nestled in my bones in the mornings when my toddler is screaming over some nothing thing, and the debt collectors for medical bills are ringing early, and my English department secretary is emailing to ask me if I might return the key to my campus office, because I guess it doesn’t really look like I use it, and I am it; I am the nothing thing.
In these moments, I think the Eight of Cups has to do with something related to but nearly opposite of failure: it’s when you’ve succeeded routinely well at some aspect of your life, but now find yourself wanting to leave it behind for something more important, difficult, enchanting, and/or unknowable. In relationship readings this shows up with querents looking to validate their feelings of “wow, I did OK solidifying this relationship, and even though it’s ‘good,’ I want to abandon it for something different and more risky.” Or in career readings, it’s the confession that “I am awesome at this job and make good money, but now want to quit, because I can’t fucking live this boring life for one more second.”
The Eight of Cups feels like “failure,” particularly for women, because we are acculturated to believe that feeling dissatisfaction with the ordinary equals failure. And the Eight of Cups speaks to the not-enough/too-much axis of motherhood: You raise your kids, and there’s this cultural sense that doing it to the best of your ability should be enough, but, really, and for myriad reasons, it’s never quite enough. There’s always a pull to be more, either as a mother, or as different person entirely.