For You to See Life - 4u2c.life

The card of the Eight of Cups portrays Psyche performing the final task Aphrodite has given her: the journey into the underworld to bring back a pot of Persephone’s beauty cream. Psyche is shown empty-handed, descending the steps into the darkness of the underworld, her face set in sadness and resignation because she realizes that she will probably not survive the journey. Behind her, abandoned, stand eight neatly stacked golden cups.

Minor Arcana ~ The Eight of Cups

The Eight of Cups represents the most difficult stage of Psyche’s journey toward her goal of relationship: the voluntary giving up of hope for the future. No living mortal can descend into Hades’ realm, and as far as Psyche is concerned, this final task that Aphrodite has set must mean death. Nevertheless she obeys the goddess, for she is loyal to her commitment to love. Thus it is a letting go of hope. All the tasks so meticulously performed, suggested by the eight neatly stacked cups, have been to no avail. She sees the situation as it truly is - that Aphrodite will never relent - and so in despair she turns her back and walks away from her past hopes.

This stage of relationship is one of the most painful, because it means that there is nothing further that can be done. Increased efforts avail nothing; we must give up and start again. Many people, when confronted with the dilemma reflected by the Eight of Cups, refuse to acknowledge the impasse, and continue to plead, bully, bludgeon or blackmail the partner in the hope of a response which is no longer possible in the present circumstances. The underworld, as we saw in the Major Arcana card of Death, is a symbol of mourning and the relinquishing of control; it is the place of the death and transformation of our old attitudes. Therefore, when nothing furthers, we must be willing to let go, not as a kind of ‘deal’ to guarantee a future reconciliation - for that is not true relinquishing - but because we can do nothing else. This is a bowing to what seems like fate, an acceptance of an ending. Whatever happens, this letting go will change us, because it is a submission to that which is greater - not the wilfulness of the partner, but the will of the divine, imaged here as the great goddess of love.

On a divinatory level, the Eight of Cups implies the necessity of giving something up. The truth of the situation must be faced; no further action will avail, and there is no way to go except to let go. Often this is accompanied by depression, for the underworld is a place of mourning. The future cannot be manipulated; we go empty-handed into the unknown.

I will explain in my readings what each card means, this is a general interpritation taken from the Mythic Tarot Deck

Information Source: Mythic Tarot Deck
[published in 1986 by Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene and Illustrated by Tricia Newell (not the New Mythic Tarot)]