Eight of Cups (Tarot Triptych)

The Eight of Cups is the inevitable hangover that follows the overindulgence of Sevens’ Debauch. Here, the pleasures that have defined the past two cards in the suit are completely dulled. This is a painfully boring situation.

In Rider, we find a man departing from a rocky shore. Eight cups are stacked on the sand and a sad Moon gazes down upon him. He dons a red cloak,red boots, and walks with a stick. This is an image straight out of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, when after his lengthy complaints and fantasies he says “Here I am on the shores of Breton. Let the cities light up in the evening. My day is done; I’m leaving Europe.”

In Thoth, we have eight cups atop eight sickly, pale lily pads, as two withering lotuses spew water into the system. The waters are swampy and the sky is filled with dark clouds. This card is the heavy dull weight of Saturn in the depths of the Piscean. It is the high pressure one feels when deep sea diving.

In Marseille, we have eight cups and a sprawling flower. In this card, Jodorowsky sees an image of fullness, rather than hangover. Qabalistically this card is “The Intelligence of the Queen”,hich here we can take to mean “knowing when enough is enough”. While Rider and Thoth fall into overindulgence and depression, Marseille exercises restraint.

This is a fairly hopeless card: the party is over, and what remains is a hangover. Often, we indulge to achieve a “high”, to have pleasures, sensual and emotional, and we generally just can’t get enough of these, so we overindulge. Saturn, as the strict and authoritarian planet, despises overindulgence and punishes accordingly with a hangover. If we stay up all night, we suffer the next day - what goes up must come down. If we can accept this, we can achieve the more enlightened position of Marseille, we can get just enough pleasure tonight and not ruin tomorrow.

The boredom and depression this card represents can ultimately serve us though, for it is in stillness and inactivity that the seeds of movement are born. It is only through a willing delve into the depth that we can achieve any heights.

Materially, the card draws up images of Leviathan and strange deep sea life. In our lives, this tends to signify a period of melancholy and depression, or directly a hangover. It may simply be “bad air” or dark clouds over one's head. If we willingly accept the heavy darkness of the depth, we will rise to even greater heights