By Sarah Taylor
Last year, Emma Sunerton-Burl guest-wrote an article on journeying into a tarot card using the Queen of Wands from the Sacred Circle Tarot. This week, I thought I would do the same, working with the idea of synchronicity (what Jung described as the “acausal connecting principle,” which forms the basis of all forms of divination) by shuffling the cards and drawing a single card from the deck. I felt moved to work with the Thoth Tarot, a potent deck created by Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris.
I shuffled three times, and was about to cut the deck when my intuition whispered to me, “You already have it,” and the card on the bottom slipped away from the others, loosening itself from the deck. I went with it, and drew one of the more beautiful cards in the Thoth Tarot in my opinion: the Two of Cups.
Working along the lines of freeform Jazz, which finds its own rhythm, structure, and meaning through the playing itself, this is my own exploration of the landscape of the Two of Cups as I walk the pathway that it opens to me.
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The fish do not merge. They are entwined, their bodies in harmony; yet they are discrete, each a whole world unto its own. Piscene interdependence. Or is that Piscean interdependence? Whatever it is, they seem to be able to live out of the water even while breathing it.
They are caduceus inverted, bringing something down from above. In this case, theirs is a dedication to bringing divine love down into created form. I don’t think about this; I am asked to feel it. Two fish, two lotus flowers, two cups. Coupling. Duality. The experience of one thing through the other; both perfect. One lotus flower sits over the other, connected by a green stem. As above, so below, movement both ways.
If there were no fish, the water would simply cycle between the two blooms, an endless loop with no witnesses to it. The presence of the fish, however, divert the two streams of water into the two cups. There is animate life, consciousness incarnated, experienced, expressed in togetherness.