Queen of Cups

The Queen of Cups is traditionally described as a warmhearted woman, well-loved as a friend, wife, or mother. She is somewhat dreamy, gifted with vision, empathy, sympathy, and imagination. Since the greater part of human affect concerns social interactions, inter-personality and interpersonal relationships are near to the core of her world. She will want to be connected, interested, and beloved, and excited to circulate stories. But she will thrive or suffer according to the quality of her social environment. Without other skills, characteristics to give her confidence, a strong will, and force of character, she may prove too passive to be sufficiently selective about the society she keeps, and indeed may overly treasure such values as unconditional friendship and love, even if these people hurt her. She will tend to be trusting, kind, affectionate, and approachable, with a capacity for forgiveness proportionate to her empathy, but betrayals of her trust and credulity could take their toll and lead to resentment and a shutting down. A sense of helplessness and a victim mentality could rob her of her gifts. Her eagerness to belong socially could also lead into smothering behavior, excessive self-sacrifice, codependence, or enabling the dysfunction of others. Even here, though, reproach belongs more to the pernicious influences than to her. This may be the reason why many artists depict her with a closed cup, protected from pollutants. In the right environment, however, she is what feeling and emotion are all about. Compassion, sympathy, and empathy would define her if you could stretch to call these definitions: their boundaries are permeable. They change with what they adopt or reflect. The name of the Asian goddess of these traits, Guanyin, means ‘attending the cries.’ They have this in common. However, there is a danger here that this goddess does not succumb to: fellow suffering, although Guanyin herself is a better fit to The World card. There are open feelings and hearts here, without much interposition of preconception and judgment, but there remains enough good sense to stay above the suffering that does nobody any good. Soft-hearted does not need to mean soft-minded, although these are often fused. A small bit of hardening of toughening can be useful here. Sensitivity need not be susceptibility to random impacts and impressions. Mistakes will be made without judgment, although frequently being open to the new will make up for being open to the wrong. The Queen simply needs to learn from all of her sampling and tasting, and lesson one is to live life in a wholesome place that encourages the aesthetic sensibilities to remain open. As a Queen, or a homemaker, she can do much to make this happen. Like a mimic, chameleon, or mollusk, she might take the shape and color of what she touches or what touches her, adopting more than adapting, and might be imagina- tive enough to become anyone, and lose herself in the mirrored hall. As a chameleon on a mirror, who she is is anybody’s guess. Her versatility could come to be seen as frivolity, her ambivalence as confusion, and her unpredictability as unreliability. But maybe it’s her true nature to shift shapes and truly be all of these things she becomes, to not have a hardened or solid core. An unconditionality of the mind brings its own set of challenges. The clarity of her perceptions might depend on the stillness or turbulence of her waters. The Queen is neither understood nor understands rationally. Critical thinking is not her strongest suit. She will tend to be unquestioning, and so can be faithful to things that are not true. She will likely be honest as far as she understands things. Hers is a protean reality, one of shifting shapes and images, and uncertainty, as the nature of the perceived reflects that of the changing observer. Belief without question, gullibility and credulity, and subsequent delusion, could be ongoing prob- lems. This Queen’s mystic and mediumistic side is often referred to. She lives close to the threshold of subconsciousness, where dreams and visions emerge. Self-hypnotic loops and experiential engulfment can make whole otherworldly worlds, but she may not be the best judge of their reality or depth, ever at risk of becoming a bliss ninny or frivolous flibbertigibbet if she doesn’t have friends who can help her stay anchored and oriented. There is a danger of spreading out too thinly. With trust in experience for its own sake, the subjective can tend to be reified, or made prematurely real. Inner musings, fantasy, and trance can go may places that reality wouldn’t dare, but this sometimes exposes reality’s failure of nerve and imagination, even leading to won- drous invention. The Yijing counterpart is Gua 58, Satisfaction or The Joyous. In addition to the above characteristics, the doubling of the trigram of the rich and sensuous wetlands also stresses the cultivation of pleasure and happiness as intrinsically benign and instructive. With self-interest and its gratification, we negotiate our own progress and personal evolution. It’s an attractive rather than a driving force, but it moves us right along.