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 explains how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
This week, I selected a card (if I can refer to it as precisely as ‘selected’) on a hunch: I decided to pick the 25th card of the minor arcana in recognition of the date of December 25, and my counting brought me to the Page of Cups. Right now, I’m hard pushed to think of a more appropriate card for the occasion of the Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus.
As a court card — along with the Knight, the Queen and the King — the Page will often represent a person in a reading, more often than the rest of the cards in the minor arcana, which tend to represent events, moods, traits, experiences. More specifically, the Page is associated with someone who is, if not younger, then youthful in outlook — childlike.
The Pages are also progenitors, in that they carry in them the seed of potential of their suit expressed in human form. This seed then grows through the worldly experience of the Knight, and matures when we assume responsibility in the guise of the Queen and King.
Finally, as one commenter pointed out in an earlier article that included the Page of Cups, the Page is an outsider in that his title implies that he is not strictly tied to the Queen and King as a blood descendant. He is in the royal family, but not of it. As writings about Jesus have described, from conception he was considered an outsider, and was ostracised throughout his life because of this. In this way, he developed a deep empathy for those who were cast out from society, and enraged many of those in authority for his teachings These were inclusive rather than exclusive, and served to bridge the divide between the outsider and the rest of society, between the individual and the collective.
When I look at the Page of Cups, I see someone who is youthful and energetic, simultaneously accepting and curious. He might be considered naive, but his openness means that he welcomes the strange appearance of a fish from the vessel that he is holding. Even an outsider has its place, no matter how strange we might judge it to be.
The Page’s dress is also a mix of red and blue: flesh and feeling. He is at once physical and ethereal, walking a line between both worlds. And yet his boots are brown, like the earth. He is grounded.