The Eight of Cups
"Neither too much hope, nor too much despair"
I felt more than a small twinge of annoyance when I drew the Eight of Cups on New Year’s Day. “Letting go” or “walking away” or “leaving behind” are the phrases that first spring to mind with a cursory glimpse of the card. In most tarot decks that follow the Rider-Waite-Smith, it features the image of a saggy-shouldered person staggering away from eight golden cups into an eerie landscape. The abandoned treasure, the figure’s slumped posture, the beckoning of the dark and seemingly treacherous cliffs read as a particularly miserable kind of experience—forfeiting the assured comfort of what one has accumulated to face the shadowed unknown and no, no thank you, I thought. Hadn’t I already just done this last year? 2021 had brought the sleepless, stumbling-about-in-the-dark hell of finishing a dissertation, health insurance snafus that had delayed my son’s ear tubes surgery, prolonging his illness, the dissolution of a friendship, breast cancer, a depressed partner, a double mastectomy, a widening gap between the money we made and the bills coming in. I had born all of this, too, while nourishing myself, denying the old call of the eating disorder that snickers through my head when things get tough. I had gone to therapy, written a manuscript, (kind of) learned how to mother a toddler, and stayed (mostly) sober.
Wasn’t I due for some kind of a boon? The Sun card’s disinfecting light, maybe, or The Magician’s spirited creativity? The Wheel of Fortune spinning me over the top of fate’s good turn? Or if not boon then at least a reprieve—The Star, perhaps, a salve for weariness and a chance at hope and renewal. I’d have even taken the Six of Swords—downtrodden and wounded as the figures on that card seem, they’re still punting their boat to safety together, aren’t they? Anticipating a re-imagination of home.
But no, I drew the card of change initiated by forfeit, illness, the swift rise of the tides. Indeed Arthur Waite describes the lonely figure heading out into the cliffed night as a person “of dejected aspect … deserting the cups of his felicity.”
As the temperature dipped to zero and the ash trees lining the Lincoln streets shushed each other in this winter’s first snowstorm, I found myself staring at the card and thinking about the connection between care and lamentation, something I’d learned recently while rereading Louise DeSalvo’s Writing As A Way of Healing. The word “care” has its roots in the Gothic kara, meaning lament, DeSalvo notes, something she in turn synthesized from Mary Sarton’s Recovering: A Journal and Henri J.M. Nouwen’s book of sermons Out of Solitude. From Sarton: “The basic meaning of care, then, is to grieve, to experience sorrow, to cry out with.” I thought about how silent the person in the Eight of Cups seemed, but how the body and its movement into the rocky, eclipse-lit land seemed to cry out quite loud enough anyways. I thought of the sobbing walks I’ve taken around Woods Park throughout the pandemic and my cancer recovery, trying to reestablish my sense of myself on the ground, walking around square bits of prairie groomed to grow wild next to O Street. What is it about care that requires us to abandon the cups of our felicity? And why such a price at all?
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Because Theo, our son, does not remember the 50 inches of snow that fell on Lincoln last year, we bundled him up in the New Year’s Day snowstorm and took him out into the front yard to see what he could see. We didn’t mean for him to be out long, but when his feet touched the ground he started off down the sidewalk muttering solemnly to himself (as many Capricorns are want to do) “walk, walk, walk.” I ran after him, (me the Capricorn muttering about the cold slapping its way through my leggings), but stopped for a moment when I caught sight of his hunched toddler’s body as he moved determinedly into the blowing snow, away from the warmth and surety of our home. I am not an imagistic person, and this is one of the many reasons the tarot has become beloved to me: It helps me to see pictures in the world, and the world in pictures. It’s a way of revisioning that has been a blessing to someone whose head is so full of words my dreamscapes are literally structured through sentences, syntax, flashing punctuation, and repeated (mis)spellings. But when I gazed at my son pushing into the snowy darkness, I also saw the Eight of Cups image from the morning draw, and in a moment saw it—and everything—briefly anew.
Instead of viewing the collapsed neck and bowed shoulders as despondency, I wondered about whether instead the person on the card might have been—like Theo—showing a kind of supplicatory willingness. A determination to move forward into uncertainty, through pain, to see what new things one could see, feel, and sense with the body in this yearning place. What would it mean to approach the New Year with such a lack of fear, in spite of all that came before? Or, perhaps more accurately, to approach it with the solemn expectation that what will come will come, and it is up to me (us) to meet it rather than cling to the past’s weighed-down comforts?
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Associated with both The Chariot and The Moon from the Major Arcana, the Eight of Cups