10 of Cups -- So negative?

YDM42

ravenest said:
Hang on now, I'm gonna defend the 10 of cups.

Since when was satiety and feeling satisfied sooo bad? How do you feel after a good meal, a good .... , even a good book? I feel happy satisfied and content. Perhaps, then, my whole internal laboritory is full of freshly released seratonin (I'M a big fan! - I love those t-shirts that say; "Release Sarah Tonin"). The negative connatations of this seem to be suggesting overindulgence - which comes after satiety, greed - a lack of satiety or not knowing your satisfaction level, or dissapointment, which stems from a false expectation.

[ here is a little picture of Sarah; :) ]

Ravenest you question is a good one. Thinking about it- makes me first consider the neccesity in our lives of the opposite. 'Complacency" might more likely follow this card than greed or overindulgence. In a spiritual sense once we decide that we have attained all there is to attain and achieve all there is to achieve, it is not greed that sets in, but complacency. We no longer continue to evolve or grow.
If life is a cycle, continuous, then when we stop growing on any level we die. A good example would be a doctor or specialist who has attained a high degree of respect and success- at this point he/she stops seeking and may even reject any new points of view or discoveries-to the detrimenit of his patients and the disease that may indeed continue to evolve and could become resistant to his treatment or even morph into another type of illness.
I can see the bad in the 10's if I accept that it is indeed a final ending and the cycle would not begin again.
 

MareSaturni

The 10/Cups can be good or bad. It all depends on the reading. It all depends on how will the querent act from now on.

I believe that in the moment the 'satiety' turn into 'overindulgence', we are about to start a whole new cycle. Apparently the person hasn't learnt. Or thought that it was an end and things were going to stay forever like that; well, they'll not. The whole Universe moves, we cannot sit still.

The Tens for me always come with a 'but...'. They are knives with two edges. Ie., the 10/Cups: "Things are great, you've got what you wanted...BUT...watch out. You may believe there's nothing left behind except emptiness, nothing that you can pursue...you may believe it's the end. And that's it's not going to change. It's never the end. Be careful with what you'll do about all these 'good things'"

The tens always warns of inertness, imho.
But we can never take things to the furthest extreme, or we might miss the 'grey' areas of life.

I'm not going to talk about Kabbalah because i know very little of it.

~YUKO
 

isthmus nekoi

ravenest said:
And did Mr. Wang deem to grace us with an explaination of what that 'more complex spirtual meaning' was? Or did he just refer to it without explaination ?(that seems like a Waite ploy in itself)

It could either relate to some complex qabbalistic context, but I feel he could be refering to a type of AC 'tantra', in which case it is tied in with the 7 cups and possibly relates to my seratonin comments above. See AC's 'Energised Enthusiam' and other tantric writings, like ' Eroto-comatose Lucidity'. Where it can be infered that a very potent magical force is encapsulated in this 'satiety' - even to the point that Crowley says; let my death be like this.

Wang's book the Qabalistic Tarot is probably one of the most lucid and straightforward I've read for beginners of Qabalah who are already familiar w/tarot. Yes, the spiritual meaning he refers to is specifically rooted in Qabalah, of which he goes into moderate detail in the first part of his book. He basically says he feels no need to occlude anything (like Waite) as he finds a common and major deterent for those attempting to learn the system is lack of mental discipline. In other words, learning the overlapping terms and layers resultant of the often seemingly contradictory symbolism of Qabalah requires a certain level of mental gymnastics that most people do not have the time and patience for in their busy lives - and as such, there is no issue in presenting the system to a mass audience.

[edit] I should clarify that the above is only my paraphrasing of Wang's opinion
 

Parzival

miss_yuko said:
....

I believe that in the moment the 'satiety' turn into 'overindulgence', we are about to start a whole new cycle. Apparently the person hasn't learnt. Or thought that it was an end and things were going to stay forever like that; well, they'll not. The whole Universe moves, we cannot sit still.

The Tens for me always come with a 'but...'. They are knives with two edges. Ie., the 10/Cups: "Things are great, you've got what you wanted...BUT...watch out. You may believe there's nothing left behind except emptiness, nothing that you can pursue...you may believe it's the end. And that's it's not going to change. It's never the end. Be careful with what you'll do about all these 'good things'"

The tens always warns of inertness, imho....

~YUKO


I appreciate this directly-to-it interpretation. If you think of the 10 of Cups as inertness, both the positive and negative aspects become possible. Yes, the rainbowed end cannot abide. As the American poet Robert Frost said, "Nothing gold can stay." It's grand and great, but next will come, a new cycle, a new search for happiness, unless it is the final nirvana or paradise.
 

Julien

Having only received the Thoth a few days ago, and having never read with anything other than RWS and variants thereof... I read the BOT, looked through the cards, and then... Well, I dove in and did some readings for myself and for close friends who can serve as good guinea pigs... I was really struck by all the 10's after doing a relationship reading for a friend that began with the 10 of Pents and ended with the 10 of Wands... After that I really needed to look through all the 10's and have been a little awed by the nuances they all seem to have, the 10 of Cups included...

And the thing of it is... There is that sense that all of them are at that "tipping point" in the suit -- all is fulfilled, and that can be a good thing... But they all seem ready to "tip" over and start a new cycle again... The image of a tipping point helped me a lot in some of the readings.

But even in other decks, the 10 of Cups has that sense to me at times that while all sorts of good emotions are present, there's very little materiality there -- and not a lot of thought... Emotion grounded in emotion... And that seems ephemereal to me... And it's the watery emotions, not the fiery ones... Water that is still goes stagnant... So I'm never fully satisfied when a RWS 10 of Cups pops up because... It often feels to me that is so full of emotions that there's no room for anything else. Now as a Wandsie/Pentacles person predominantly, that never puts me in a place of ecstasy... The Thoth 10 of Cups, though, seems to bring the other layers of meaning into such a moment... Yes, I like it better, I think.

But that's just me... With the Thoth, I think there's a bit of realism in the cards (all of them) that I'm rather enjoying. The dark side of each card is as present as the light side... So I'm not seeing "positive" and "negative" cards so much (except for Indolence -- the 8 of Cups -- that one takes my breath away, really). And with the 10's, it just seems to be that they're deeper or have more layers to them than the RWS cards.

Julien
 

rainwolf

ravenest said:
Hang on now, I'm gonna defend the 10 of cups.

Since when was satiety and feeling satisfied sooo bad? How do you feel after a good meal, a good .... , even a good book? I feel happy satisfied and content. Perhaps, then, my whole internal laboritory is full of freshly released seratonin (I'M a big fan! - I love those t-shirts that say; "Release Sarah Tonin"). The negative connatations of this seem to be suggesting overindulgence - which comes after satiety, greed - a lack of satiety or not knowing your satisfaction level, or dissapointment, which stems from a false expectation.

[ here is a little picture of Sarah; :) ]

I think the 9 of cups serves as the point of satiety. In the Thoth, 3x3 cups fill the card and most things are symmetrical. Jupiter also takes rulership which also tells me that there is generosity and enough for all. Group this with pisces (martydom and giving all you can--to a light degree) and I think this is the limit before you are overwhelmed.

Jupiter and pisces (dignified, also) are extremes in giving. One is generosity, and the other giving all but your necessities.

Compared to the 10, the cups are in a towering tree of life shape. Mars in pisces is selfish of resources, and unthankful. This may be belligerance if we compare to alcohol.

I agree that the 10 of cups can be good, but what good we see is mainly held by the 9's perfection from the 3. Mars can be assertiveness in love (such as intervention), but these can be rare, and even then it is not all positive.

Even if we have predetermined thoughts of certain cards (10 of cups as good), we arent the ones the choose their order. We can't expect the 10 of cups to be good when it comes up because the 9 may come up instead, for example. Don't mean to soapbox or anything, but getting stuck in fixed meanings was hard for me to get out of and I know its not a great way to read cards. To each their own however.

RW
 

Julien

rainwolf said:
I think the 9 of cups serves as the point of satiety. In the Thoth, 3x3 cups fill the card and most things are symmetrical.

I agree that the 10 of cups can be good, but what good we see is mainly held by the 9's perfection from the 3. Mars can be assertiveness in love (such as intervention), but these can be rare, and even then it is not all positive.

I think Rainwolf's understanding of the 9 as satiety is excellent. It's almost as if the 10 of Cups suggests an overflow -- now, overflow isn't necessarily "bad" (depending upon where it is in the spread, the question, etc.), but it does mean that the cups will not be as full as they had been before -- either they will be completely empty, or they will only partially full...

The 9's in the deck seem to show completeness before the moment when completeness becomes the eve of change... They seem to be the moment when you exist fully in that energy for just that moment -- perfection of whatever element... The 10's are the eve of change... The moment just before everything is different. Things aren't different yet, but they will be in the next breath.

Julien
 

namesoftrees

10cents

the one and the many..
the card in its context I think is important.

is the one cycle really a loop.. or does it spiral close to where it was in the first loop but it can never quite be the same because it is there a second time? Then it's not the upward downward, or the cyclic representation I'm seeing, but the exponential flux creates a spiral or rather a continuum not navigable by geometry..

Surely the crescendo of a 10 cups intimates the momentum of learning and teaching. Wheras the 9 is holding his breath the 10 is a flux card -in the act of giving there is release from the individual to the world. Thus 'less' and 'more' together. In the together: synergy. That's how I see it.
 

namesoftrees

which means I believe, that Crowley gives it the more ... individualist approach.
 

isthmus nekoi

Julien said:
But that's just me... With the Thoth, I think there's a bit of realism in the cards (all of them) that I'm rather enjoying. The dark side of each card is as present as the light side... So I'm not seeing "positive" and "negative" cards so much (except for Indolence -- the 8 of Cups -- that one takes my breath away, really). And with the 10's, it just seems to be that they're deeper or have more layers to them than the RWS cards.

That's also why I prefer THoth's pips. They seem to illustrate the energy of the minors rather than a manifestation of it, like the RWS. I find it easier to "feel" what a minor means w/Thoth, it's more instinctual (for myself anyways).