The Five of Cups
As we’re approaching the station, I’m having the time of my life with guest posts. I’ll be sending this one out on Friday even though it’s not specifically about the Five of Cups (turns out finding an apartment, moving, and working on an application with 20 pages of essays is not leaving me much writing time?!). But fuckin wow am I excited to share it with you. It’s by Penny Weber, who got me into Black Sails, The Untamed, *and* Lord of the Rings, and with this piece is about to get me and also you into DS9.
My baby don't understand me/ Anymore/ What do you do/ When that happens?/ Where do you go?/ When the only home that you know is with a stranger? I sometimes have trouble differentiating between the Fives of Cups and Pentacles. Both are about loss, deep intense loss from which there is no coming back. But the Five of Pentacles is thoroughly embodied, a loss you feel everywhere in you. The Five of Cups carries a sort of emptiness. It’s a loss that you’re aware you need to feel, but don’t know how. That thing where you can respond to “how are you” with “truly terrible” but do it with a smile not because you’re playacting, but because you're not actually physically feeling the emotion you’re certain that you feel.
The Four of Cups is about apathy, and the Five carries that forward. Something I’m sure I’ve harped on before and I’m sure I’ll harp on again is that compartmentalization gets a bad rap. It is often good, appropriate, and necessary to temporarily box things up. The Five of Cups is the sort of loss that accommodates this. It’s just as much the promise of the feeling as it is the feeling itself. It makes it a strangely Swords-y card— an intellectual understanding of your emotions as opposed to the actual emotions themselves. The Five of Cups is what you experience when your feelings are too big to feel.
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You’ve got a nine to five, so I'll take the night shift/ And I'll never see you again/ If I can help it/ In five years I hope the songs feel like covers/ Dedicated to/ New lovers. I think of Fives as lonely cards. Also, alone cards. The Five of Cups, to me, used to just be about an individual internal experience of loss. But then I started thinking about the Five of Cups in Deviant Moon. (Which was the deck I learned with, but the image just didn’t fit with how I was understanding what I read about the card anywhere, so I put it away until I was ready to complicate it.) In it, one moon creature is standing above the other, screaming. Xe is very frightening, or at least I am very frightened of xir. The other one is sitting, facing away, hands covering ears, grin on, tongue out. I usually think of the Five of Cups as the aftermath, but I think this version of this card is very much asking us to think about the Five of Cups as actual event.
There are some ways that loss is easier when it’s inevitable. I think the Five of Cups is a challenge not to look past that type of loss, but to not stop there. What about unnecessary loss? Loss born out of malice, or cruelty? How does that complicate grief and sorrow and shame?
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This house was once my lover/ In a season that I dreamed/ An ordinary summer/ With a gentle river breeze/ Sing goodnight/ Sing goodnight/ To the boardinghouse. The Five of Cups is the first card that I ever pulled. I’d pored over books and websites for months, made playlists for all the cards, and gotten read for by friends and strangers, just like all the books had said. It was finally time. I don’t remember if it was a one card draw, or a two card draw and I can’t recall the other card (I think maybe that?). This was when I was still doing open questions as opposed to themes, and I’m not sure exactly what I asked, but I know it was about an extremely close friend who had ghosted me (I found out later she became an ex-gay). I don’t know what I had been expecting from the cards, but I wasn’t really ready to get hit over the head like that. Because of the way that ghosting works, it’s hard to directly process a loss— after all, nothing ever actually ended. But here were cards, telling me that it was time. I remember not being sure what I should be fighting against. Did this mean magic was real? That it wasn’t? That she really was gone? It’s an introduction to the cards that I carry with me.
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My Baby Don’t Understand Me, Natalie Prass
Night Shift, Lucy Dacus
Goodnight to the Boardinghouse (Reprise), Gabriel Kahane
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