Eight of Cups

The eight of cups card in the Rider-Waite tarot deck to me expresses a complex reality, at a tangent to what you might read in occult/tarot instructional books. The individual on the card is wearing a red coat, which to me indicates a life or death situation or context. The path that seems easiest for him to walk, of a shallow stream set between mid-size rock formations, has been made inaccessible to him for some reason; the moon's eclipse of the sun adds emphasis, finality, and fatality to this. Yet, as is crucial in the Rider-Waite deck, the sky is pure blue, rather than grey or streaked with clouds. The situation, for the red-coated individual, is not an ambiguous one. The sudden shift is also made decisively; to reach his psycho-spiritual destination, he must turn uphill, away from the easy path, and starting laboriously from the ground. He is in tune, in his turning, with the powers of Earth, including the rock formations themselves, as is indicated by his physical alignment with the largest rock formation. The spiritual energy he emanates, and which allows him to perform the correct physical task, however laborious, is why the suite of Cups is appropriate.