Four of Cups

The Four of Cups shares a difficulty with the Four of Wands: the nature of the Four is to seek composure or composition, to develop structure and stable identity, but operating through a fluid element keeps changing all of that. Affect is ephemeral. A sort of dynamic equilibrium needs to be found, but without the complex skill sets and tools that come with the lessons of the higher numbers. We think we know where we’re going, then realize halfway there that we really want something different, or that ‘there’ is not what we thought it might be, or even that ‘there’ was all in our head all along. We have an affective attainment or satisfaction that soon feels empty, stagnant, or sour. We discover that feelings and emotions are fluid and compromise our stability, or else they keep on going with some kind of inertia when we need to change our directions. They are not always responsive to the equally dynamic realities of living. Water is a fluid and here it flows nowhere. Simple adaptability simply isn’t enough. Just when we get our attitude readjusted, the thing we’ve just adjusted to changes. The subject in the RWS deck is pausing to reassess, reevaluate, or reexamine what has brought him to this pass, or impasse. It’s easy to imagine that the cups were full of wine and that our subject is rethinking everything and abstaining for now. And then we might continue the analogy and imagine that he is moving towards recovery and working his fourth (!) step, ‘making a searching and fearless moral inventory.’ In any event, this sort of personal reassessment is a core meaning of this card. The counterpart in the Yijing, Gua 39, is Impasse or Obstruction, and depicts coming to a place where further progress is blocked and some sort of detour, bypass, or emotional resilience will be required. The text speaks speaks specifically to a temporary halt to one’s progress in order to work on one’s character, a revision of either one’s identity or one’s purpose. Sherlock Holmes might call these ‘three-pipe problems.’ But you know he would make the most of it, and that is the real key here: we make new contacts and see new possibilities when we pause to look around us, to ponder or reexamine where we are going. We might be complaining of a detour which could turn out to be a much richer experience than meeting our original goals. Plan B stands for Better plan, at least when Plan A has failed. One of the common subtitles for this card is blended pleasure, an obscure joining of words that might mean pleasure mixed with confusion, doubt, perplexity, discomfort, or anxiety. Or it could mean ambivalence, or vacillation. The astrological correlate of Jupiter in Water signs means a sense of self that wants to identify with feeling and emotion. This can be good when affect agrees with a pleasant reality or even if it simply remains fairly stable. But when feelings are challenged or challenging, so is this sense of self. One gets confused, rather than simply sensing confusion. Such an unpleasantness can be taken too seriously, or too personally. To feel like a success, one might need to reestablish the goals in terms of attainability: baby steps, taken one day at a time. The worst approach here is to sulk and pout, to fester inside, to get stuck in emotional feedback loops, to be self-absorbed in a self-limiting self, to take the pity pot for a throne, to see change as upset, to be unresponsive, all in order to have some constancy to the feelings. Such spells take time to break, while the world moves even further on. And time in such moods is always always and never, never just for a moment. So what if this is the end of a path or of one chapter of life? It’s the plot twists that keep it interesting. A good mystery should take a convoluted route. Routines become ruts and entrenchments. Habits turn into addictions. Things arise, things pass away. It’s our readiness in need of renewal. On the positive side of things, this card can be used as an emotional skill set. Variety of experience expands and extends the range of what we can identify with, of who and what we can be, provided that we learn to not cling to favorite states. We can keep the attitude going while plans, goals, and directions are changing or even reversing. Our fearless and searching inventory becomes a catalog of attitudes, from which to pick and choose. We are detoured but not deterred. We can look for new opportunities that are sideways from where we were going. On the less obvious positive side, disillusionment means being stripped of our illusions, disenchantment, freed from enchantments, and disappointment, informed that our appointments need tuning. We rediscover our broader selves and find the paths not yet seen. The best of our feelings need refreshing: from time to time is good, but continuously is much better.