Living in Our Feelings: Rereading Tarot's Cups

Sep 2

Psst! At the end of this month, I’m opening the doors to Tarot in Community, an online space for queers, feminists, and leftists to learn tarot, and merge it with their work in the world. Sign up for the waitlist here!

*a black person with short cropped blonde hair looks directly at the camera. they are wearing a sheer black shirt and wooden beads. their hand is on their neck.*

When I was twenty-seven, I had an abusive boss.

The work was remote, part-time. It was "good" work, community work.

But every time I saw their name in my inbox, my stomach started to hurt. I knew that when I opened the email, I would have to read their insults.

In person retreats were even worse. They wouldn't tolerate even the most justified of criticisms.

They believed any difference of opinion as a threat to their authority. To them, authority and leadership were synonyms.

I grew up in a household where physical and emotional abuse were as routine as taking out the garbage. My upbringing normalized abuse. It was part of the life's noise--unpleasant, but unavoidable so best to simply ignore it.

Even though I rejected that idea with logic, my emotions held a different wisdom.

My logical mind said "if abuse doesn't look like [insert catastrophe], then you're overreacting." Yet my wise emotions didn't agree.

They made me sick. I had IBS flares, lupus flares, trips to the hospital. I slept more than usual, my heart raced, I'd sweat through my shirts in meetings.

I knew that if I acknowledged what my emotions told me, I would lose my job.

As someone with no (and I mean zero) familial support, losing my job could have meant homelessness. Losing my job meant not being able to afford medication, or transportation to school.

Capitalism & Emotional Neglect

Life under patriarchal capitalism requires us to neglect our emotional wisdom.

The patriarch tells the queer "man up." The patriarch tells the trans person "you'll never be what you say you are." The patriarch tells the son "boys don't cry." The patriarch tells the daughter she's irrational.

The patriarch tells themself that emotions serve no purpose. The patriarch tells themself emotions make no sense.

The patriarch can be of any gender. The patriarch lives inside of us until we kill them.

One cannot remove the patriarch from themselves. They are a parasite. To remove the patriarch is to kill the patriarch.

We learn we must suppress whatever doesn't maximize profit. We never learn to engage our emotions and learn their lessons. We incarcerate those who's emotional responses the patriarch deems disruptive or incorrect.

This is how patriarchy teaches us the internal control capitalism requires. When we oppress ourselves, it becomes natural to oppress others.

Even those of us working towards liberation may still feel hemmed up by these early lessons. This is why a rereading of tarot's suit of Cups is essential.

Tarot's Cups flow free. They are a reminder that we weren't born suppressing our emotions. We learned to suppress our emotions through misogyny, queer antagonism, and punishment.

Tarot's suit of Cups roots itself in a complex present, and an enlightened future. It's important for queers, feminists, and leftists to attend to both sides of this suit.

We must reclaim and reread tarot's suit of cups to serve our needs. We must also understand that we live in a funhouse mirror of what the cups could become.

Tarot's Cups help us understand the emotional toll of capitalism now. They can also open our hearts to the emotional clarity freedom could bring.

What Rereading Tarot's Cups Isn't

To embrace tarot's Cups, we must embrace our emotions and their wisdom. This is something that gets tossed around in queer and feminist spaces a lot, perhaps too much.

This is, in part, because white cis women dominate these spaces.

The white cis women who dominate these spaces normalize the way they express their emotions. They universalize their freedom of expression, and cultural forms of communication.

Nowhere is this more evident than girlboss "feminism."

For whom is "leaning in," or a leadership workshop the solution to workplace inequity? For whom is radical softness a weapon?

Who does this culture allow to be the face of softness? Who does this culture make the face of threat? Whose emotions matter?

Give a rich queer a $200/hr therapist and they will proselytize as though they hold the key to liberation.

The factors that prevent genuine emotional expression are always individualized. They pay lip service to Systemic Issues TM, but at the end of the day it's "your feelings, your problem."

But their feelings are everybody's problem. When white cis women feel frightened, someone could get lynched. When white cis women feel threatened, they look around for a some Black person to blame.

This isn't emotional freedom, it's the wages of whiteness.

The current white feminist traffic in feeling good is a bid for yet another stake in white supremacy.

It's not that white cis women don't deserve to feel good. It's that our current system allows them more than their share of resources. There's nothing revelatory about them finding emotional satisfaction while we suffer.

A rereading of cups demands pleasure for everyone.

A rereading of cups the right to grieve, the right to heal, the right to wholeness and autonomy.

You can't get that at a one-day leadership workshop or on BetterHelp.

Reclaiming Tarot's Cups

So what does reclaiming tarot's suit of Cups look like?

I don't know that we can be completely sure. However, we may be able to imagine what it feels like.

Like Tarot's Pentacles, there are major themes that run throughout each suit in the minor arcana.

Like their counterpart in playing cards, the suit of hearts, tarot's suit of Cups is the site of big feelings.

In tarot, there's more than one way to understand an archetype.

When we view tarot's suit of Cups through the lens of our present systems, we see how capitalism may have manufactured those crises. We see how capitalism may have enabled those wins, or that ease.

When we view tarot's suit of Cups through what we want to make manifest with our work, we could see a new world. A world less encumbered by systemic oppression, but still full of life's ups and downs.

I may be a utopian socialist, but I understand that even utopia has weak wi-fi and burnt pizza and bad tinder dates. It's worth it to imagine a world where freedom of expression wasn't bound by market forces, or omnipresent surveillance.

Here are some themes that emerge for me:

Love, Community, and Satisfaction

Tarot's suit of Cups is a key to deep satisfaction.

Those with a passing knowledge of tarot will locate this satisfaction in the Two of Cups. Those of us who study tarot deeply know that the Two of Cups can bring love, but doesn't ensure satisfaction.

Tarot's twos speak to our relationships. They tell us there's someone else to consider. Yet to we must enter a relationship for that relationship to satisfy us. So the Two of Cups can set us up for that success or disappointment.

This isn't to say you wont feel satisfied when you pull the Two of Cups, but it's not a given. Same with the Knight of Cups. Someone can enter your life and fuck it up completely, both now and in a happier future.

What the Two of Cups, the Three of Cups, the Ten of Cups, and the Knight of Cups offer us is the opportunity to love. They offer us someone or someones who may love us.

This can be a lover or a friend, a parent or a partner, an individual or a whole community.

Loving and accepting love are some of life's' greatest joys. This is true even under capitalism. It will also be true when we move on from capitalism.

The Three of Cups and the Six of Cups find us loving up on our communities. Mutual aid, spaces for joy, and collectivity reign under their influence.

Self-esteem and self-love are also envisioned in the Nine of Cups. The Nine of Cups also asks us to know the difference between self-esteem and ego. A useful lesson.

Confusion, Grief, and Isolation

Real emotional freedom welcomes all emotions, including ones that aren't pleasurable.

Confusion, grief, and loneliness are all part of tarot's suit of Cups. We find these themes in the Four of Cups, the Five of Cups the Seven of Cups, and the Eight of Cups.

Yet, even these emotions aren't "bad." The confusion of the Seven of Cups can bring our intuition into focus. The isolation of the Four of Cups leads us to clarity. The loneliness in the Five of Cups and the Eight of Cups help us grow into our best selves.

Embracing all our emotions can be a kind of freedom. There will always be unpleasantness, fear, rage.

We are not meant to eliminate such emotions. It's the factors and systems that make sure some of us have far worse experiences than others that we must dismantle.

Creativity & Intuition

Creativity is a fundamental theme of tarot's suit of Cups.

The Ace of Cups is an initiation into that creativity. It's a fertile card, full of possibility. It's a card of emotional abundance ready to show up where it's most needed.

Tarot's Cups ask who we want to be. They ask us "how do you want to feel?"

This is a question that requires both creativity and intuition, one of the other virtues of tarot's suit of Cups.

The Queen of Cups, the King of Cups, the Page of Cups and even the Four and Seven of Cups show the connection between creativity and intuition.

As a tarot reader, I'm often reminded that we cannot predict what we cannot imagine. To give accurate predictions to clients, one must expand our realm of possibility.

To work for freedom is to live in two houses at once. We must be honest about how dire our situation remains. We must also create the stories that transform those conditions.

We must live in the present, and feel its crushing weight. We must live in the future where we are free.