Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article tells you how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
This week, I was somewhat waylaid as I tried to set an intention to write an article about the Sevens in tarot. Rather willingly, I admit. I think it’s sometimes useful to set a cat among the pigeons when a routine becomes — well, a routine. It allows for spontaneity and a certain unexpectedness to creep into the proceedings.
I was about to sit down and draw out the four Sevens from the Rider-Waite Smith deck (which I will be covering in the next few weeks), when I felt a strong sense of — how to put it? — “Nooooooooooooo!” at the prospect of writing an article about them. My intention was there, albeit at less than full throttle. But my will was not. Where did my will want to take me? To Debauch, apparently — occultist Aleister Crowley and artist Lady Frieda Harris’s interpretation of the Seven of Cups.
I’ve found that some cards, more than others, have the ability to provoke a reaction in people. I am drawn to Debauch, but I’m going to suggest that I am probably far from the only one. Debauch, I am certain, catches the eyes, minds and emotions of many people who come face-to-face with it. And I’m not saying you have to love it to be drawn to it. No, indeed. Repulsion is also a sure-fire indicator that something in the card is worthy of exploration.
And that name. Debauch. Not “debauchery.” The absence of the lighter tone of that final “ery” prevents us from dismissing it quite as easily as we might want to; there is no escaping its sound, which is flat, dissonant.
This is the entry for “debauch” on dictionarygeek.com:
– verb-transitive
1. To corrupt morally.
2. To lead away from excellence or virtue.
3. To reduce the value, quality, or excellence of; debase.
4. Archaic: To cause to forsake allegiance.
– verb-intransitive
5. To indulge in dissipation.
– noun
6. The act or a period of debauchery.
7. An orgy.
Keeping our attention focused on the word itself — especially as it pertains to points 6 and 7 above — there are certain meanings and images we might attach to it that perhaps appeal on a more prurient level. We might indulge our fantasies about what forms “debauch” would take for us. It allows us to enter a dialogue, whether easily or with resistance, with those aspects of human behaviour that are, more often than not, deemed unacceptable, and which are relegated to sessions sequestered from public scrutiny. Here, we are given permission to crack the door and take a peek. (For example, it gives me permission to concoct a suggestive article title.)
But then it is time to move our focus away from just the word, and to take a good look at the card. A good, long look. Really: try it now. Perhaps it is at this point that the meaning shifts for you. If so, perhaps it shifts subtly; or perhaps you see a new side of “debauch” altogether. Speaking personally, when I stopped thinking “Ooooh, debauchery!” and started examining the card, it didn’t look titillating or tempting at all. In fact, I remember telling a teacher of mine that it looked like “a tea party gone wrong.”
And this is the point, I believe: Debauch is not only about our shadow material. Debauch also reflects our reaction to our shadow material. It is, after all, in the shadows not because it should objectively be there, but because our judgements about it have put it there. Shame, fear, unworthiness, disgust: these are some of the emotions that cause us to consign something to the closet of our consciousness in the first place.
And that is where, I feel, that the true meaning of Debauch comes in, and which is described in point four of the definition above:
“To cause to forsake allegiance.”
In other words: it is to disown parts of ourselves so that we are no longer allied with them. We do not support them, we do not admit they are of us. Debauch invites us to examine those behaviours, beliefs, thoughts, emotions that we have consigned to the closet by examining the feelings that put them there.
Many references to Debauch emphasise rottenness and decay, and ‘too much of a good thing’. Even Crowley himself referred to it as “one of the worst ideas that one can have; its mode is poison, its goal madness.” This is the card of substance addictions, although addictions can just as easily be psychological and emotional. It is these that I am most interested in, because they tend to be hidden from ourselves as much as they are from others. They really are in the shadows, even to us. They are the things that we keep doing, that we keep believing and that we keep saying — to ourselves as much as to others — that keep us at odds with the truth of ourselves, and which hold us back from expansion into a life that is calling to us.
These two broad interpretations come from different directions, but the result is the same: in some form or another, we turn our back on ourselves; we sell ourselves down the river. Harsh language, I know, but Debauch, like much of the Thoth Tarot deck, doesn’t pull any punches.
However, both interpretations offer a solution: integration. There is the invitation to reunite the disparate elements within, by examining what it is that we feel or that we don’t feel, that we do or that we don’t do, that maintains an illusion about ourselves at the expense of our evolution.
So this is my invitation to you, if you feel inclined to do it. (This is not a throwing down of the gauntlet, and you will not be judged either way. Above all, be gentle with yourself.) Look at the card, and name the feelings that come up when you do. Stick with feelings. Once you’ve done that, choose one feeling and describe the nature of its link to the part of the card that prompted it. How are they related to each other?
If you feel like posting what you’ve written, then feel free to do so here. Or you can email it to me if you feel the need to share privately. Or keep it to yourself. I’ll post my own observations that I made when I did a similar exercise last year as part of a Thoth Tarot course run by Thoth expert Emma Sunerton-Burl. Most importantly, if you feel like talking to someone about something that emerges, pay care and attention to yourself enough to do that. This is not meant to be a gruelling exercise at all, but, as with the will vs. intention experience I had this morning, the unexpected sometimes comes up.
In the words of Gerd Ziegler in Tarot: Mirror of the Soul:
It’s time to open your eyes and take a look at (perhaps a painful) reality. Only by perceiving, by recognizing your own inner reality, will you be freed!
It is when we are prepared to accept ourselves — warts, dripping slime, and all — that we begin to see the patterns that we are caught in and the games that we play, and we start allowing the currents of our lives to flow again.
(With thanks and gratitude to Emma Sunerton-Burl.)
Hi Dianae. I am not familiar at all with the Crowley deck, so my perception was based on first impression alone and my experience with the two decks I do use. Your insight is appreciated and helpful. Thanks.
This card always illicits a queasiness in the pit of my stomach, I work with this deck and know this card well. An old friend showing up again on the cusp of a New Moon to shake me awake again on the road to the newness of Spring!
I hear the old Fleetwood Mac son from 1973 Hypnotized.
I need to face something that’s holding me back.
I need to quit something and clean my brain to see the truth.
I know I will be free to move forward then.
That’s how I see/feel it,Sara.
Hm…it’s been interesting reading everyone’s responses to this card. My take on it was quite different. The card’s intended meaning aside, this is what I perceived. I see it as a candelabra. Candles that once illuminated the shadows of a dark place have melted and are creating a pool of wax below. The delicate pink flowers have snuffed out the flames, as this light has served its purpose–for now. Pink and green are heart chakra colours. The heart has been illuminated in its hidden places and integration has occurred, which can be seen in the way all the cups are connected. The design on either side of the number 7 resembles a pair of dragonfly wings. Dragonfly reminds us to be mindful of illusions. Perhaps this is the illusion of assuming our deep inner work has come to an end. The pool of wax resembles a piece of wood, indicative of a floor. This floor can also be a ceiling, leading to another room below. Deeper into the abyss. Shadow play intermingles with reality. The small pink flowers also look like bonnets, covering the eyes of the wee flaming fairies that wear them. Perhaps symbolic of ‘seeing the world through rose-coloured glasses’ or ‘pulling the veil over our eyes’. I see wonderful healing that has taken place, yet the reminder that there is always deeper we can go. As for the word ‘debauch’, when I looked up the word debauchery, the definition I got was ‘excessive indulgence in sensual pleasures’. Candles, romance, heart chakra, an exploration into the shadows — some high-quality and powerful sexual healing perhaps? Debauchery doesn’t have to be a ‘negative’ thing. It’s all in the way one looks at it. We can choose what we want to see.
Gee, I totally missed this post. I’ll pick it up in the subsequent 7 Cups post.
But a tech note: Crowley was not the first to give names to the minor arcana. Golden Dawn always had names for the minors. But perhaps Crowley was the first to print the names on the card. This seems redundant, you’re supposed to know the GD card correspondences well enough that when 7C comes up, you think “Lord of Illusionary Success” (or Debauch as Crowley summarized it).
Numbers run both directions on a linear scale. They also run in patterns, such as 3-6-9 and in a spread they can move synchronously, i.e., 2 and 10 next to one another. They can move by prime, 1,3,5 or non prime 2,4,6. The Tree of Life offers pathways, i.e., Fool = 1-2, Magus = 1-3 and so on. So we have nearly total flexibility with numbers but we have boundaries such as: the Tree of Life descends with lower numbers increasing top to bottom, and most decks are designed to tell a story from the Ace to the 10.
Also: The colours of blue/green are analagous rather than complementary in the spectrum; speaking not of contrast and tension but comfort and ease.
The structure is supported by a God concept (designating the whole theological/moral edifice/enterprise of Victorian culture and society in Britain) that maintains the rot.
Crowley went to university in the 1890s and the intellectual and cultural milieu will not simply have been forged with philosophical currents of the day but the whole ‘fin de siècle’ anticipation of transformation at the century’s end.
Most likely Crowley would have been hoping that the human essence would be freed from the contradictions and hypocrisies that he would, like Nietzsche, have felt constituted the true depravity – that of taking ‘Man’ out his natural state and subjecting him to a theological tyranny that truly warped the essence of humanity.
Len – I saw Eric’s response as implying that the cards work in ascending order, which is how I’ve always seen them. In other words, the balanced nature of the 6 somehow goes awry in 7 and then 8, and so therefore the caution is to watch out for this tendency.
Eric – your point taken about introducing the cards and situating them more. I wanted this to be an exercise in projection, but a bit of theory might not have gone amiss.
Crowley brings up all kinds of things for people – he is controversial. I know little about him, and my own experience is that what is written about him — and what he writes of himself and his beliefs – is either subjective or obscure enough for me to feel pretty ignorant about the man.
However, two points that came up out of this discussion for me. The first is to do with Crowley’s saying, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” The judgement that we attach to this statement can make it seem immoral – that is one interpretation. I mean, he is arguably advocating that we can simply do whatever we like, damn the impact of our actions. However, the point for me is that he is right: we *can* do what we like. We are free to do that. We are free to act independently of others’ expectations of us, and the boundaries that society, community, the law, authority figures, lay down for us. Arguably, “do what thou wilt” could be applied to the process of individuation or self-realization that is expounded by psychoanalysis and its ilk. It is about breaking free and living one’s own truth. The consequences of that, then, lie in our hands. Doing what thou wilt can cause tremendous damage. Conversely, it can come with a significant sense of responsibility. It is when we see the statement in the context of Crowley’s life that we perhaps attach an interpretation to it.
The second point is that I tend to subscribe to the idea of “Death of the Author” when I approach tarot cards – and the Thoth is no exception. Cards behave in certain ways, to be sure, but I think that is our subjective reaction to them based on what we know about them. The Thoth’s reputation precedes it … enough for me not to be able to look at them separately from Crowley himself, or from Harris, to a more limited extent. I would be interested to see just how much perceptions of the cards changed if they were conceived of and painted by a little old lady from Denmark, for instance … or a maths professor … or Sigmund Freud. At a certain point, I like to put the characters of the creators aside and see what the cards speak to me, even if it flies in the face of what they were originally designed to represent.
My own reactions to Debauch were akin to alpssmile’s observations. I identified strongly with it from a feminine identity point of view: a feeling of repression, and rot and stagnation in many respects. I’m pretty aware of the whats and whys, and the card assisted greatly in digging some of that out. “And yet the colours are rather beautiful. Pinks, greens – both of which are there in many of the cards I love. It is the green dripping algae of stagnancy that gets to me. Stagnancy, over-indulgence or an imbalance of one property which then throws everything off balance. But still the flowers draw my eye, because they are so dainty and untouched by the slime and bloody sludge. Like a tea party gone wrong. The cups are frivolous and insubstantial – or, rather less severe, decorative. They are not fit for purpose, and so they couldn’t manage the flow. The symbol – which might be astrological – is also representative of “female”. This feels like a very feminine card at its root; but femininity that has been bound – the tea party; frivolous; meant to look pretty but the pretence can’t be kept up; like foot-binding: dainty, neat, yet damaged and fucked up.”
Thank you, one and all, for a truly invigorating debate!
Whatever one thinks of Crowley as an Occultist he was in reaction to his times and his brand of hedonism and thelema will carry the hallmarks of a cauldron-formation in reaction to the prevailing religious and moral ideology of his time.
With that in mind I see his ‘revolt’ expressed in ‘debauch’ – it isn’t the act, it is the essence he is looking at. The essence is represented by the liquid – greenish slime in this pictorial. Of course, what contains it? What is the structure that houses it?
Surely in his perspective and experience it will have been modes of moralising conventional religiosity with their purity emphases but attendant hidden skeletons in closets!
Interestingly, there aren’t just 7 cups! Well, there are but they come in a 6:1 configuration that gives a clue to my mind about his thinking. In biblical numerology the number 7 was one of perfection, symbolising deity. 6 was clearly the human number. You can see this right from Genesis – 6 days to make the world and on the 7th perfection of rest. Men (women too!) labour 6 days and should rest on the 7th.
7=God and 6=Man: Perfect/Soiled. And then in the final book 666 the unholy trinity – man’s number as the writer puts it.
In the mythology that wends its way through the bible this 7/6 drama is played out on both a cosmic and mundane level.
The 7th Cup in Crowley’s representation is the largest (the greatest) and on the traditional mythological canvas should be the most exalted as representing God.
However, in this picture it is the lowest, the most debauched – arguably the 6 above are freeing themselves from the mire and exalting themselves into true purity by casting off the drowning (being vanquished?) 7th and traditionally greatest cup.
This can easily echo the works of Nietzsche among others and therein as representing a transvaluation of all values, which may resonate with feminists, occultists, victims of any stripe of tyrant in terms of casting off the ideological straitjackets that have defined their freedom of expression for so long.
So maybe, just maybe, Venus in Scorpio AND Jupiter in Aries and next week Uranus at 1 degree Aries are fitting astrological counterparts in the interpretative piece?
Just a thought!
my eye is drawn to the structure holding the cups and the colors — uterine formations dripping with putrefaction. i see this as the feminine response to sexual energies run amok, a stickiness that inhibits free flow, a call for some kind of dispersing agent. lack of balance, lack of responsibility due to compulsive behavior. this personally revealing and powerful. thanks for the call to attention, sarah. really helpful.
Every card has its place. This reminds me of the compost pile. It stinks and it’s poisonous to humans, but rotten decay is the process whereby worms, bugs and microbes turn carbohydrates back into soil. This part of the process is rotten and stinky and that’s why you don’t keep it in the kitchen.
Yeah, Crowley was a dick. What do you expect? He was a loyal subject of the British Empire during the peak of that empire’s existence. He worked as a spy for the British secret service from the time he was in college in the last decade of the 19th century until his death. An African history class when I was in college dealt the final blow to any devotion to Crowley’s teachings I had left from my OTO days. His philosophy of Thelema is hardly distinguishable from the philosophical excuses the Europeans of his time used to make themselves feel OK about exploitation and genocide. Do what thou wilt is a fine moral code for a psychopath- one who has no empathy.
..Yes, Venus in Scorpio. That’s one that needs to be baked on. It could be the most righteous tool for illumination, or the most potent of destructive forces. Scorpio can freak my ass out, being 12th to sag.,.. it makes me check, and re-check. Venus should make us turn to Taurus for some illumination, and Libra for some understanding. I myself possess the N node and uranus in Scorpio, which rules my 5th, and my 6th ruled Sun/merc/nep.
An unhealthy ooze, a muck, a mire – those are what to my mind first. So much so that I felt some repulsion at the entire drawing, that no matter how interesting it may appear to be, what it is is nothing but falsehood and poison.
Such an interesting post – the first thing I wondered when I saw this card was if Crowley had addiction issues himself. I’m entirely unfamiliar with the Thoth deck except for the cards shown in these postings, and in general, I prefer the Rider-Waite Smith images. In this case though, I prefer the Debauch card to Rider’s seven of cups, and my feelings about it seem like they might border on a “wrong” or mistaken interpretation of what the image means, but I’ll go for it anyway!
I really like the structure holding the cups together…I’m not sure if it is a tree or a scaffold of some sort, but I love the fact that it gives order and even a bit of a hierarchy to the cups. The feeling I have when looking at this card is one of witnessing a birth. To my eye, it seems like this tree of cups has emerged and risen up from some kind of primordial soup and is dripping with the remnants of its fluid of origin, which it will soon shed altogether as it assumes its place in the world. In that sense, the fluid dripping off the cups does not feel like decay to me; it just seems that the image of this tree of cups has been caught exactly as it is manifesting from the sea of liquid and making its appearance into the world. The yellows and greens and blues in the card remind me of spring and new life as well…..of course, I am here in New England, where I am so starved for one little sign of spring that I may have a case of wishful thinking!! But there it is.
I think when addressing one deck, we might want to mention that Crowley is the first to name the minor arcana; Waite was the first to illustrate them with scenes. In the Marseilles version of this card, there are simply seven cups. There is an argument to be made for stripping away all of the lower arcana illustration, which is a form of editorializing.
Crowley has strong bias in many of his cards. Some are transcendent; others are downright cruel and do not, in my view, assist the reader in objectively assessing the situation.
Also to view this card with any detachment it would be helpful to assess the astrology, which is Venus in Scorpio. That is not necessarily debauched; I am sure I would never use that word to describe the placement.
Sarah,
Provocative indeed, thank you.
As a novice who does not recall having seen this card before, the first word that came to my mind was excess.
Also, something Eric wrote confused this novice. Do the lower arcana progress in reverse order, from higher number to lower? Please forgive if that’s a dumb question.
Jere: Feeling your words. You have my full compassion. You have my utmost respect.
Thanks Eric, yes, the card is absolutely suggestive of some sort of action or intervention being required before the once-beautiful object is entirely lost. It’s like a warning sign – there’s something going on with something you once valued, fix it now – clean it now, or it will be lost, perhaps forever. And in the process – out of laziness, or neglect, or simply lack of awareness – you’ve allowed something beautiful to be destroyed. It says: “Warning! Get off your arse and do something! I [the card] am making you aware of something – go and deal with it before it’s lost to you forever! And if it’s your conscience, or your soul [which is possibly the most beautiful thing we have], then go and clean it! Now.”
Oddly enough Sarah, I’ve just spent the week having exactly that conversation with a significant Other – interesting that you pick it out now.
Eric, Crowley was a dick. An academic dick. Dude was an egocentric fuck-hole,.. who just so happened to make some brilliant connections.
Sarah,.. this card always makes me ill. It reminds me of one of my exes telling me that she was scraping cum off the toilet seat of her old tweaker house, with her fingernails. It’s just plain nasty.
It speaks to me of fermented sexuality, it’s not allowed to dry so it bubbles and malts. It’s the junky who can’t let go.
..I have more, but I need some time to calibrate..
..trip’s just keep getting cooler..
Jere
Ah, but I deliberately didn’t want to contrast today, Eric. I wanted the card to be as provocative and potentially divisive as it is on its own, without its being tempered by an outlook that is perhaps more forgiving and balanced. Everything in moderation, including moderation.
Also recognizing who this card is coming from, we can take the source into account. The occultist behind it was someone who lived for debauchery. The 7 of cups in the waite smith deck is mellower, and that is one reason I prefer to contrast at least two cards of the same number and suit for a balanced approach to what the card is. Crowley gives a pretty extreme vision, and he was a sex and drug fiend to rival any rap star. The 7 cups on the waite smith deck is more about not being able to see yourself amidst many possibilities.
All the lower arcana represent worldly situations, which are always subject to change, sequence, evolution, movement, etc. The 8 is not in much better shape, ‘indolence’, so there is laziness implied, perhaps chemically induced or perhaps that goes with an addiction pattern. Things are still going pretty well around the 6, which is a balancing point of emotional-sexual energy. The question of this card might be something like ‘where did things go wrong’, or ‘how much is too much’. It is cautionary, and the action recommended is not laziness.
I mean “IRREVERSIBLE” – neither fata not irreversible, as in, the thing is only in a state of disrepair, not decay. Geez, I should take a moment before I hit the “submit” button so I stop clogging up these posts! Sorry folks!
Thanks Eric – so the corruption of something beautiful? But according to the drawing on the card, the ‘harm’ seems neither fatal nor reversible. Am I being Pollyana?
I can’t tell what the object are – teacups (but there are no handles) – some sort of cups or maybe candle-holders. Whatever they are, they’re quite pretty but in a state of disrepair, and clearly in need of attention – nothing to be afraid of at all. Seems a shame to let something so beautiful be thus forgotten – with a bit of TLC, it looks as though they should be good as new!
Cheers.
In practice, this card represents a lack of integrity related to deception or overindulgence in substances — sometimes both.
Hi Sarah,
The card suggests to me a quagmire. A place where something is stuck. It doesn’t appear to be as dark and nasty as the name suggests (was this Crowley’s view on the shadow-self?), but something that needs cleaning – something that’s been neglected for a long time, and once cleaned, can be used again. The teacups are interesting, suggestive of something very ordinary, and usually quite acceptable – nothing to be ashamed of at all in fact. As if to say, well you’ve got these beautiful things, and you’ve let them go for awhile, so take another look, and give ’em a good clean!
Cheers,
Indrani