Four of Cups · Cups · Water

A young man sits cross-legged on a green mound, his back against a tree trunk, arms folded across his chest, head tilted down, eyes lowered. He wears an olive tunic over red sleeves, blue hose, red shoes. Three gold cups stand in a row on the grass below him. From a grey cloud on the left, a hand holds out a fourth cup by the stem, level with his face. He does not turn.

Pamela Colman Smith gave him no enemy and no wound. She gave him a pleasant afternoon: turquoise sky, leaves closing over the numeral IV, distant blue hills. The only trouble in the picture is the angle of his gaze.

The cup is offered. The offer is not refused. It simply is not seen.

The Golden Dawn seats this decan with the Moon in Cancer and calls it Blended Pleasure: feeling turned so far inward that it goes flat. Waite read weariness, a surfeit rather than a lack. The three cups on the grass stand upright and whole. He has enough, and enough has stopped registering.

Upright, the tradition reads a withdrawal doing quiet work: the pause, the reappraisal, the refusal to be moved by a new offer before the ones already on the ground have been weighed. Boredom taken seriously is information.

Reversed, the same dial turns outward. The head lifts, the arms come unfolded, the fourth cup is finally noticed. Or the withdrawal hardens into a mood that has forgotten its own reason and just prefers its own tree.

Nothing here is being taken from him. Something is being held out, and he has decided in advance that he knows what is in it.