Four of Cups (Tarot Triptych)

The Four of Cups is comfort, familial love, and emotion. We are given three very different interpretations of this same force in each deck.

In Rider, we see a youth no longer satisfied by material pleasure. He sits like an ascetic beneath a tree, rejecting the phantom hand that holds out a cup for him. He is like the Buddha, denouncing the world for the sake of what’s higher.

In Thoth, we see four golden cups and elaborate pipe-like roots leading to the Lotus, which is pouring down water into the cups. The clouds in the sky are the silvery gray of the Moon, and the wavey Sea is the light blue of Cancer.

In Marseille, we have four cups and a pillar-like flower. Qabalistically, the card is the Mercy of the Queen. This is the love and kindness of the mother.

A good upbringing with a loving family leads to, at its best, an individual who is secure and can withstand the tumult of the world. Often, however, people lose themselves within the comfort of home, reject the external, and remain in arrested development.

In Rider we see a boy who is becoming unhappy with his comfort. He may be preparing to grow, to expand and transform. When Crowley described his Thoth card, he gave it a subtitle: “The Seeds of Decay”, which lay in the fruits of pleasure.

This is not to say comfort is always bad; there is a time and a need for it. Childhood may be best spent in comfort, butwhen childhood ends, the comfort must be abandoned and the enchanted circle of the mother broken.

If this fails to occur, one will remain in an illusion, a daydream, an oedipal hologram meant to keep an individual from individuating. This is the struggle of the card's astrological placement: the Moon in Cancer, even though it is in the sign of its rulership, is prone to delusions and extreme sensitivity to the world around it.

The card is notably featured in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. The Kid finds it in a destroyed house and then pulls it while having his fortune read:

When we pull the Four of Cups we can expect a slow and comfortable energy to be at play, we don’t need to worry. Nothing is falling apart, for now.