King of Cups · Cups · Water

The King of Cups sits on a broad grey stone throne with scrolled arms, on a flat slab out in open water. No shore, no horizon, only pale ground behind him. The sea runs choppy in blue and yellow-green. One shoe, gold-green and scaled like fish skin, hangs over the slab’s front edge. A fish leaps clear of the water on the left. On the right, at the border, a ship with a red sail rides the swell. He is dry.

A gold crown set with red, a pale blue coif, an olive cloak, a red mantle across the chest, a pale blue robe over the knees. A gold fish hangs at his throat on a chain. One hand holds a wide gold cup level by the stem, the other a short sceptre upright, its head flared like a lily. His head is turned away from the cup, the way you look at weather you have already decided to sit through.

The sea moves. The throne does not.

He closes the suit of water. Tradition reads him as counsel and composure: a man who can hold the whole depth of a thing and keep the room steady, weather other people shelter under. Upright, that is empathy with a spine. He feels the situation, reports it plainly, carries someone else’s grief without going under. The cup stays level on a moving sea.

Reversed, the composure goes brittle: feeling administered instead of felt, the calm face the thing nobody can reach. Or the water takes the slab back, and the man meant to sit above the tide is ruled by it. Either way the sea stays an inch under his shoe.