Page of Cups

The picture

A young figure stands on a strip of yellow sand in front of the sea, which is drawn as three flat wavy bands and not much more. Blue tunic scattered with pink lotus flowers, pink sleeves and hose, and a soft blue cap with a long tail hanging over one shoulder.

A gold cup is raised in one hand, and a blue fish has come up out of it and turned its head to look at him. He is looking back at it, mildly, with the faint expression of somebody being told something moderately interesting.

The other hand is on his hip.

Upright

Feeling arriving as something strange, and worth attending to while it is still strange.

The fish is the card. Something has come up out of the emotional water unasked — an intuition, a dream, an odd impulse, a mood with no traceable cause — and the Page's entire contribution is to look at it instead of explaining it away.

That is the whole competence on offer, and it is smaller and more useful than wisdom about feeling. He does not know what the fish means. He has not decided whether it matters. He is looking.

His other hand is on his hip

A fish is speaking to him out of a cup and he is standing there with a hand on his hip.

The posture is doing a great deal of work. There is no alarm in it, no reverence, no reaching for a notebook. He is not treating this as a visitation and he is not treating it as a problem. It is closer to the stance of somebody listening to a friend say something unexpected across a table.

Which is the difference between this card and its reversal. The Page is not overwhelmed by what came out of the cup, and he is not managing it either. He is just not startled, and the ease is the skill.

Reversed

Sensitivity with no container around it. Feeling taken for guidance far too quickly, every mood read as a message, the fish believed on sight.

An inner life can also come to be preferred to the outer one. What is happening in the cup gets steadily more interesting than anybody in the room, and the hours migrate accordingly without a decision ever being made.

As a person

Somebody whose responses run ahead of their explanations. They will tell you how they feel about a thing before they can say why, and they are right more often than the sequence suggests.

Frequently young, and not necessarily. The card describes a relationship to one's own inner weather in place of an age, and plenty of people arrive at it late, after something knocked the explanations loose.

In a reading

Where a spread asks what to do: take the odd feeling seriously enough to look at, without yet acting on it. The looking is the instruction and the acting belongs to a different card.

It is read as immaturity, which mistakes inexperience for a fault — nothing here suggests the openness is a phase. With the Knight the feeling acquires a direction; with the Moon, the strangeness becomes considerably harder to trust.