For You to See Life - 4u2c.life

The card of the Queen of Cups portrays a pale, mysteriously beautiful woman with long, rich black hair, wearing a blue-green gown and a golden crown. She is seated on a golden throne whose arms are engraved with golden snakes. Her robes trail into a deep blue pool at her feet. In one hand she holds a golden apple; in the other, a golden cup into which she peers with a look of profound concentration. Behind her, beyond rich green fields, can be glimpsed a deep blue sea beneath a vivid sky.

Minor Arcana ~ The Queen of Cups

Here, in the card of the Queen of Cups, we meet, the stable, containing, introverted depths of the element of water - the private inner world of feeling which is bottomless and ultimately unfathomable. This is embodied in the mythic figure of Helen, whom we met in the Major Arcana card of the Lovers, and whose beauty was so great that the Trojan War began because of her. Helen was the child of Zeus by Leda, and when she grew to womanhood at the palace of her foster-father King Tyndareos of Sparta, all the princes of Greece came with rich gifts as her suitors. Eventually she married Menelaus, who became king of Sparta after the death of Tyndareos. But the marriage was doomed to failure, for Aphrodite promised Paris, the Trojan prince, the most beautiful woman in the world if he awarded the goddess the prize in the beauty contest which we encountered in the card of the Lovers; and Helen was that woman.

In due course Paris and Helen met and fell in love, and Helen elopeed with him, the result of which insult to Kino Menelaus was the Trojan War in which Paris was killed. But Helen's beauty eventually attracted her three more lovers - not to mention the hero Theseus who abducted her when she was only an adolescent. These later lovers were all men who won her favours while she was held behind Troian walk so Helen enjoyed an eventful ten years of war. When the Troians had been defeated Menelaus went to seek Helen, whom he had sworn to kill for her adultery. But at the sight of her beauty he fell in love all over again, and brought her back to Sparta. Whether she remained faithful to Menelaus for her remaining years is a question which myth does not answer.

Helen, the Queen of Cups, is more than an image of alluring feminine beauty. She embodies the hypnotic power of the feminine world of the feelings, a power which is magical and magnetic and defies a mere physical perfection. Throughout Helen’s story, countless men pursue her; yet we never really know from the tales what Helen herself wanted, or what sort of woman she really was. It is as though she herself is water, and all men see in her the reflection of the depths of their own souls.

She is a cypher, a mystery, motivated by her own secret purposes and feelings. She might be taken as a whore, since she apparently offers her favours to so many men - some of them enemies of her own homeland. Yet we are left with the feeling that, passionate though she might be, Helen does nothing that she does not wish to do. Even her choice of husband is indeed a free choice, for in the story she indicated her favouring of Menelaus by placing a wreath on his head - an unusual thing for a woman of the time, who was usually forced to marry whomever her father or brothers wanted her to. When she tires of Menelaus, she fearlessly pursues her great love adventure witt Paris rather than resorting to coy clandestine meetings. Whomever she loves Helen gives herself to wholeheartedly. She conquers men without trying, because she is the embodiment of all the secret unconscious fantasies of the perfect woman that men have attempted to articulate over the ages. The figure of Helen is both virginal and harlot, acalculator and a victim. In short, she is a mass of paradoxes, for although the logic of the heart is unarguable, yet it defies rational analysis, and often flies in the face of morality. The Queen of Cups is elusive as a character, yet she stirs up trouble wherever she goes, activating the depths in others and inaugurating action and conflict without doing anything at all. Thus she may be seen as an image of the unconscious, pursuing its secret purposes unbeknownst to the conscious mind, yet luring the individual into crisis and conflict and intense passion and fate through its mysterious seductive power.

When the Queen of Cups appears in a spread, it is time for the individual to encounter the deep, unknowable, paradoxical world of feeling in himself or herself. The Queen of Cups may enter one’s life as a mysterious, hypnotic woman, not necessarily overtly seductive yet strangely disturbing, and a catalyst for the emergence of deep feelings and fantasies which have previously been hidden from awareness. She may appear as a beloved or as a rival, but either way such an encounter is not mere chance. It is rather an augury for the emergence of these soul qualities within the individual. For the woman who is unaware of the Helen in herselfand identifies with the maternal or practical sides of feminity, the Queen of Cups implies that it is time to meet her, even if the catalyst is the ‘other woman’. For the man who is unaware of the depths of his own soul, and bases his reality on rational thought and concrete facts, the Queen of Cups heralds a deepening and development of the inner life, whether or not the catalyst is an actual woman.

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)]