Seven of Cups: Fact, Opinion, and Social Media
image: a Black person with an afro wearing a gray top and jeans. they're looking at the computer, drinking from a blue mug, and holding a pencil and paper.
It used to be "everyone's a critic." Now everyone's an expert.
Or, at least, they must be because everyone seems to have a public opinion on what you personally should do.
What you should do to heighten romance. How to set better boundaries.
Even something as difficult as ending a friendship, or distancing onesself from family.
Not only do they know what you should do, they've gotten it down to 280 characters.
The "I" statement is dead, long live the advice industrial complex.
If a stranger offered the content of at least half of all tweets at a party, most would see it as an imposition.
It would be a violation of social boundaries. Shit, even telling a friend how to resolve an issue unprompted can be rightly called a faux pas.
And yet, unsolicited life advice proliferates and the Seven of Cups reigns.
The Seven of Cups is a card I associate with social media.
It's a card of illusions, half truths, whole lies, and surprisingly big decisions.
The Seven of Cups is a grab bag: here a birth, there a divorce, there an engagement and, yes, here some completely unsolicited life advice.
The goal of the Seven of Cups is to trick you, because it is among tarot's sevens. But it's also here to strengthen your discernment by knocking you on your ass. (Or at the very least, threatening to do so.)
The other side of the Seven of Cups is its potential for spiritual awakening.
The online spiritual landscape, like the Seven of Cups itself, is a grab bag. It's helped people find spiritual teachers and community. It's gotten people scammed out of all their money. It's allowed us to watch supposedly spiritual people do terrible things. (Anyone remember the person selling human bones in New Orleans on FB?)
Social media has empowered people to go on spiritual journeys back to ancestral practices. It's led people on paths for which they were destined.
It has also introduced the world to a whole lot of bullshit.
Figuring out what's bullshit and what's legit is a central characteristic of social media. It's also the Seven of Cups' whole deal.
I mean, look at the image. In one cup a snake, another a dragon. Here a castle, there a ghost. Will it be laurels or riches, or an untimely demise? Depends on what you choose to pursue!
Depends on who you follow. Depends on who you are and how close you are to the voice inside yourself.
Vetting a potential spiritualist or reader isn't as easy as a checklist, unfortunately. Talent, safety, and size of following have absolutely no inherent correlation.
Much of it is about discernment. That could mean reviewing who their teachers are. That definitely means asking around, looking a testimonials, and seeing who your friends go to.
I wish that was enough, though it often isn't. You can do all these things and be mis- or half-led.
Another way to to look at the Seven of Cups is as a variety of facets.
It can tell you that the answer is both good and bad, yes and no. That it transcends these binaries, or leaves them wanting.
The Seven of Cups may appear when a potential teacher is wise and also corrupt. It can happen when a spiritual community is controlling but full of kind people. Or it can come up when your own spiritual practices are in flux, bloated, or created from too many parts.
That's something else that social media magic can get ya: a little from column a, a little from column shit. People start taking this from one tradition, that from another, and trying to call it a whole.
People dibble and dabble in things they have no business in in the first place. They often get messy in the process.
The spiritual advice industrial complex sometimes claims to be in opposition to that. But how can it be so with a loudspeaker.
Many are speaking to everyone at once, hoping it will stick with the impact of tapping someone errant on the shoulder. It wont. It's advice into a void that will use it as it will.
Whatever is taught, shared, or advised will spread well beyond it's target. In such an environment, even the best spiritual teachers and mentors cannot have entirely good work. That's the nature of social media.
I this this is especially complex for those of us who work in ancestral and/or closed practices. By sharing, and I mean sharing anything, we may be teaching someone who wasn't meant to be taught.
This, too, is the multifarious nature of the Seven of Cups. By trying to do the right thing, one does sometime do the wrong thing.
I write a weekly blog, by no means do I get off scott free in this conversation. I am a regular, fallible mortal and like most other spiritualists, I'm doing my level best.
At the same time, some of the realest and most practiced workers and teachers are pushed off social media. Or they simply hate it enough that they must be sought out through other means.
While this is, you wont be surprised to hear, a mixed bag, mostly for those in search of someone great, it's a net good. It means there's an alternative outside the seven cups before us.
We can opt out, have quiet lives, live free from the complexity of being consumed online.
The Seven of Cups shows us how what we don't see is as real as what we see. We're constantly making decisions based on both.
What we dont see can be our projections, reality, or what happens behind the scenes. These factors can be even more important than what we do know, about a reader, a practice, or our own lives.
When someone seems to be going out of their way to obscure the facts of their expertise, that's a real red flag.
Avoiding fandom, being diligent, and sniffing out scams can help us lean into the Seven of Cups. It can also keep us from the worst of its pitfalls.
Further Thoughts
image: hey, i'm cyree jarelle. I run Collective Cartomancy. I help queers, feminists, and leftists connect with their intuition using tarot and cartomancy. More on me.