8 of Cups — The Sun Keeps Rising and Falling
Today’s card is one of my favorites. Mainly because I love doing hard things that challenge me for the purpose of personal growth and collective healing. One of the best things to do for collective healing is to detangle and disengage ourselves from situations in our personal lives that have overstayed their quantum welcome.
Ask a Horse for Help
From Lettie Jane Rennenkamp: “Walk away, ride a horse away. Endings aren’t always easy but the past passes away and the sun keeps rising and falling in the sky. You might be refusing to leave a situation or staying past your welcome. Ask a friend (or a horse) for help to walk away.”
The 8 of Cups can also indicate a situation when this places a particularly difficult onus on us. All those Cups in the foreground…those are the endeavors, people, love, creativity, progress, projects, commitments you’ve spent long hard hours (months, years, decades even) pouring your soul into. It can feel like the Cups are you. They’re not.
This card also invokes the Hermit in his infinite wisdom regarding the fact that you will always be you even if you’re not surrounded by the material proof of your endeavors…perhaps especially if you’re not buffering yourself with those items of proof that you’re worth it. You are worth it and wise beyond measure, when we retreat we get to see that. We get to see that who we really are not only remains, but strengthens and clarifies without the static interference of the material things we usually use to define ourselves.
Also, as Cups are the suit of emotional wisdom and creative flow, riding that horse off into the sunset (or solar eclipse as the original SRW card indicates) will probably bring a cascade of creativity that your conscious mind could never foresee. Thus, our sigil for today will invoke Creative Freedom.
Saturn in Aquarius Semi-Square Neptune in Pisces
The “home base” astrological placement of the 8 of Cups is Saturn in Pisces. In that station, Saturn would be the father/boss figure who compels Pisces to walk away from a situation that has overworn its capacity for success and has become precarious and flawed.
Presently with Neptune is in exaltation in Pisces, so you may feel other dreams and visions percolating from your soul and vying for your attention, begging you to let them take the place of this one (or these 8).
Semi-Square is one of my favorite minor aspects. As an avid Shadow Worker, I love mining for truths who have been obscured and would prefer to stay that way. Akin to a full-on square, the tension and challenge of a semi-square can also help us grow and learn. However, unlike a full-on square, we don’t necessarily feel the semi-square’s unpleasantness, making it easier to avoid, ignore, and suppress. This is a sorely missed opportunity for huge personal growth and collective healing.
Today our semi-square may feel something like this: The limits, structure and discipline employ in the realms of community, collaboration and philosophical idealism in our work and relationships are experiencing some unpleasant, but almost ignorable tensions with the spiritual awakening, cosmic love and sense of all-one-ness that you truly crave achieving through introspection, imagination and intuition.
Our astro-glyph sigil today will help us reveal the true potency of these subtle tensions which we would rather ignore. We invoke this clarity and strength in order to lead ourselves into long-term solutions.
Build Your Intuition With The Tarot
If you’ve enjoyed today’s column, I invite you to join my weekly email group where we practice the mystical art of scrying with Maria DiStefano’s Circle of Life Tarot to improve our psychic senses and deepen our relationship to the Tarot. You can also get email notifications for this very weekday Tarot-Astrology collective readings posts that you’ve just read. Last but certainly not least, we use Lettie Jane Rennenkamp’s Many Queens Tarot for all of our weekday readings this year which is the source of the beautiful images in these posts.
