Welcome to My Tiny Tarot Practice. I'm Amelia Hruby, and this podcast documents

my tiny tarot practice as I explore the tarot card by card, starting with the suits of the Minor Arcana.

Today's card is the Knight of Cups.

In the Rider-Waite-Smith version of the tarot, all of the knights are on horseback.

The Knight of Cups is too on horseback, but their horse is not really in motion.

One leg is up, perhaps poised to take a step, but the scene is very still.

The knight has on a winged helmet, a suit of armor, a tunic covering that armor

that has a fish swimming in the sea on it.

And the knight and their horse are in a desert landscape with one small stream trailing off into the distance.

The knights are often seen as cards of action due to the horses in all of them.

And we think of the action of cups, the action of emotion, we are invited to enter the relationship

between feelings and actions.

Often we think of feelings as states of being and actions as things that we do,

and we think of that as somehow separate.

But I really love how Jessica Dorr in Tarot for Change invites us to think of the way

that we can enact our feelings and how sometimes things we call feelings

actually arise from the actions themselves.

She uses the example of self-love here as a reminder that sometimes we may not feel the love,

but we can enact that love through our actions.

We can produce the feeling through the actions just as much as feelings may invite or invoke us to act.

And so I love thinking of the Knight of Cups in this way, as dissolving this tension between feeling and action

by reminding us that it is a cycle.

Rachel Pollack's interpretation of the Knight of Cups also finds in this card,

the tension between imagination and fantasy that I explored with the Seven of Cups.

And in the Seven of Cups, there are seven cups floating in the air in front of this person.

And we have this implication that you have to make a choice,

but everything is pretty fantastical in the feelings space, the spiritual space,

the imagination space.

And in that card, we're invited into distinguishing between imagination and fantasy.

And I love that Rachel Pollack brings us back here with the Knight of Cups as a sort of reminder

that if you stay in that space of fantasy, if you don't use the creative force

and power of your imagination to bring these fantasies to life,

then you actually end up stuck and motionless.

Here we see the Knight of Cups as the knight that doesn't move.

This stuckness can result from remaining in the realm of fantasy.

So I've shared before that I think of each suit of the tarot as a journey. We begin with the ace,

which is both the seed and the encapsulation of the entire suit. Then we move from the 2 through

the 10 different moments on our developmental journey related to the theme of that suit.

And then with the court cards, I think we see these different versions of ourselves,

these different archetypes that arrive, that we encounter, that we become on that journey from

the two through the 10. So with the page where the sensitive emotional child, with the Knight

of Cups where that Seven of Cups moment, where the indecisive fantasizing teen or 20 something

perhaps if we want to stick with this developmental reading of the court cards. I think it's suited

then that Jessa Crispin in the creative tarot also refers to the Knight of Cups as the hopeless

romantic. The one who is way more into fantasizing about the perfect love than into actually being in

love with real people and all of the messy implications and complications and beauty that.

Brings. So as I sit with this card today, I think of the Knight of Cups as an invitation to

investigate where I might be feeling, how I might be acting, and the relationship between those two

things, as well as a gentle nudge to perhaps consider if there are places where I am indulging

in too much or too little fantasy. The Night of Cups could be a beautiful medicine for someone

who's in a deep earth moment where everything feels really material and really heavy. The Night.

Of Cups can come to remind us that we can fantasize, and through our fantasies, if we use the

creative power of our imagination, we can transform our circumstance. We can change.

And here is where we can see and be reminded that the Knight of Cups looks eerily like the Death card

from the major arcana.

We have in the Death card also a person seated atop a horse facing the same direction.

Death, of course, is holding a black flag and the Knight of Cups is holding a cup,

but both have that richness of the potential of transformation.

And it's a matter of whether we remain in the fantasy or we're devoid of the fantasy,

Lingering the fantasy and spending no time with the fantasy can be as detrimental for our imagination

and our imaginative capabilities to transform our lives.

Thank you so much for listening to my tiny tarot practice. As always, you can find a link in the show notes

to my bookshop where I curate tarot books and decks and magical resources.

If you make a purchase through that link, you will add something fantastic to your library,

and I will receive a small affiliate payment that helps me keep this podcast going.

I wish you many wonderful fantasies. Be well.