For You to See Life - 4u2c.life

The card of the Knight of Cups portrays a pale-skinned, beautiful young man with black hair and soulful eyes, mounted on an elegant white horse. He is dressed in a violet tunic and silver fish-scale armour, and wears a silver helmet crowned with a silver fish’s tail. He leads his horse gracefully across a bubbling stream where fish leap from the water. Around him lies a romantic landscape of woods and green hills, while in the distance the sea can be glimpsed beneath a pale blue sky. In one hand the Knight holds a golden cup.

Minor Arcana ~ The Knight of Cups

Here, in the card of the Knight of Cups, we meet the volatile, sensitive, changeable dimension of the element of water, which like the stream is full of life and always moving. This is embodied by the mythic hero Perseus, who is motivated on all his adventures by love of women, and must on his journeys confront the many faces of the feminine, both dark and light, before he can be united with his love. Perseus was the son of Zeus by a mortal woman called Danae, to whom the god appeared as a shower of gold. Danae’s father Acrisius had been warned by the Delphic Oracle that his daughter would bear a son who would kill him, so he shut Danae and her infant up in a chest which he cast into the sea. Protected by the water-deities, they were washed ashore at Seriphos and taken under the protection of King Polydectes. But Polydectes fell in love with Danae, and pursued her all through the years of Perseus’ childhood and adolescence. Eventually Polydectes resolved to kill Perseus because the young man opposed the match, believing his mother deserved something better. So the king therefore sent the young man on an apparendy hopeless quest, to obtain the head of the terrible Gorgon Medusa.

Perseus was favoured by goddesses each step of the way. The Graeae, three old crones who shared only one eye between them and who knew the secrets of the future, told him where to find the she-monster, and Athenen provided the young hero with a magic shield. Thus Perseus was able to slay the Gorgon by watching her reflection in the mirror of the shield, in order to protect his mother. He took the head of the Gorgon with him and on his way back to Seriphos he passed through Ethiopia, and had to rescue the beautiful maiden Andromeda from the clutches of a sea-monster. He killed the monster, freed the girl, and married her. Then he returned to Seriphos, killed Polydectes who meanwhile had attempted to assault Danae, and set forth with his mother and his bride to the place of his birth, where his grandfather Acrisius had once tried to murder him. Although he did not deliberately seek vengeance against Acrisius, he accidentally killed him, and thus became king of Argos. But the place held sad memories for him, so he travelled to Tiryns, where he founded a glorious house.

Perseus, the Knight of Cups, is an image of the true romantic spirit, the champion of women in distress, the worshipper of love, beauty and truth, and the defender of high ideals who ceaselessly searches for that perfect love which ultimately exists only in the spirit yet which always seems to be around the next comer in the next beloved. The romantic spirit of the Knight of Cups embodies all that is gentle, idealistic, and kind, although he is not a weak character and is capable of sacrificing everything in the name of his ideal or his beloved. This is in a sense a picture of the state of being ‘in love’, an experience which every realist may claim dies rapidly with the familiarity of marriage, children and family obligations, but which every romantic believes can and ought to remain forever. When it does not, the Knight of Cups may move on, still seeking the ultimate experience of holy love. The holiness of the Knight of Cups does not, of course, preclude sex. But sexual relationships for this figure must be blended with love and a kind of ecstasy of the spirit. ‘Mere’ bodily satisfaction does not interest him. Historically, the ideals of courtly love which flourished in the Middle Ages reflect the spirit of the Knight of Cups. The young knight always worshipped his beloved from afar; he would not sully her with base desires, but wrote poetry to her and often offered his life to protect her.

Perseus is different from other heroes precisely because of this high idealism and worship of women. Unlike such figures as Heracles, who meets his challenges because he is attempting to expiate a sin, or Theseus, who meets them because they are exciting, Perseus follows his fate because of love - primarily, at first, love of his mother. This quality of worshipping and idealizing the mother is characteristic of the Knight of Cups, for despite his strength he kneels at the feet of a queen - a woman higher and more powerful than he. The quality of love represented by the Knight of Cups often contains this element of worshipping someone before whom one feels slightly unworthy - or someone who already has a husband. It is not yet a love of equals; that we must meet later in the Queen and King of Cups. But it is, in its fashion, love, and should not be mocked as adolescent or immature. Without the Knight of Cups, we would live in a bleak and colourless world indeed.

When the Knight of Cups appears in a spread, it is time for the individual to experience this heady and romantic dimension of love- Often the Knight augurs a proposal of marriage, or an experience of falling in love. Sometimes, on another level, he implies an artistic proposition, a relationship of another kind which is no less exalted and idealistic. Or he may enter one’s life as a poetic and sensitive young man - a herald of one’s own emerging romanticism.

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)]