TAROT OF THE MONTH
October leans toward Samhain like a pilgrim approaching a threshold.
The fields dim, hearth-smoke sweetens the air, and the world seems to tilt toward the West, where memory ripens and the Gate of the Dead opens a finger’s width. This is the season of lanterns and listening, when the living and the ancestral mingle in the same breath.
This month, the current that moves beneath events is the Ace of Cups.Magick Without Tears with Marco Visconti thrives on reader support. By choosing a paid subscription, you help keep new posts coming and fund ongoing research and writing. Thank you for considering a paid subscription to support this publication.
Within that ambience, the Ace of Cups arrives as the first sound of water in a cavern, a pulse from the unseen that tells you there is a river below the floor of things. The Egyptian myths lend a subterranean feel to this card. The underworld is imagined as a night sea journey, with the Sun as Khepra, travelling through darkness, reborn from the waters at midnight, while Anubis keeps the thresholds. These are not dry catacombs but moving depths, a Duat of currents, ferries, and passages. The Ace of Cups, then, is the Grail that catches the underworld’s first rain, the proof that the dark is not empty but gestational.
In Thelema, this ATU is no simple promise of romance. It is the root of Water itself, the primordial Grail, the feminine complement to the Ace of Wands, derived from the lunar yoni just as its fiery sibling is from the solar lingam. Crowley writes that upon the dark sea of Binah the Great Mother, there rise twin Lotuses that fill the Cup with Life-fluid, a current that may manifest as water, as wine, or as blood according to the work at hand. Above the cup descends the Dove of the Holy Spirit, consecrating the element. At the base gleams the Moon, for it is the virtue of this card to conceive and to bring forth the second form of its nature.
Frieda Harris paints the vessel as a living icon. The bowl receives scalloped radiations of light that meet the undulating horizon of the sea. On its face, she places the interlaced triple rings that Crowley elsewhere associates with the Aeons of Isis, Osiris, and Horus. Even if that emblem differs from the Mark of the Beast, the artistic choice reminds us that the Cup includes and reconciles epochs of consciousness. It is the matrix in which a new Aeon’s wine ferments.
Seen from a Qabalistic perspective, the Ace of Cups is a font in the supernal triad. It is the boundless possibility of creation, the field where every feeling is a seed and every seed is already wet with becoming. It is the Graal at its essential, receptive, lunar virtue, the place where spirit and substance first agree to meet. In this reading, the Ace carries not only the root of water but also an implicit trinity, already poised to manifest.
So what does that mean for October’s lived texture? Water at the root softens what has grown rigid. It irrigates exhausted soil and invites us to drink and be changed. Expect a month of openings in the heart, of reconciliations that do not require words, of inspirations that arrive not as arguments but as tides. The Cup descends before the story begins. It is the first yes.
