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A doorway works perfectly fine in both directions.
Never mind the dedicated pressure triggered in and out doors at the supermarket, I’m talking about your ordinary door.
Threshold, portal, liminal space – its all the same basic idea here.
The collective energies have been niggling at us through the eight of cups for a while now, and it isn’t done with us yet. The energy hinted at turning a corner with it as we talked about the other day in the Standing in the Shimmer post and the brilliant @spiralseatarot on threads once again wrote the eight of cups and about holding space for good things to fill the gap where we have let go of the things that no longer serve us.
Inspired by the gap in the cups that she pointed out, I intuitively heard “portal in time.” Time is something worth exploring in connection with the eight of cups.
The card at its core is about letting go of something while at the same time walking toward something better. It looks back and ahead simultaneously from the portal, the gap in the cups, this bubble we forever live in, this present moment.
Setting mindfulness and the present moment aside for another time, let’s think of the two directions we can cast our attention with this card.
With the classic Pamela Smith artwork, we can’t see what the figure is walking toward. The future is literally out of view. The crescent and round face in the clear, cloudless sky very likely was mean to communicate moon energy, but the crescent and round shapes seem a bit of a moon and sun combination – yin and yang together. That with the clear, cloudless sky both hint at infinite potential held in that out-of-view future.
The Tao Te Ching tells us that one becomes two (the unified oneness of everything can be understood in harmony of opposites, yin and yang) and the two becomes three (I see it as an echo of biological reproduction) The three becomes five (the five classic elements) which in turn comprise the totality of the physical world to this system of thought.
Long story short, the future hold a LOT of potential with this card.
The portal to the future, the gap in the cups, the space Spiralsea advises us to hold is where we draw from that infinite potential. The gap/portal/space is this right-now moment where we make the decisions and take the real world actions that influence the way things go from here. The figure on the card is taking a step. It’s not the cliff dive we see on the Fool card. This has a deliberate quality. This is a decided first step in a new direction.
It takes courage to step in to a new and unknown direction.
It takes courage to deal with the past.
If the background of this image hints at an unknowable but potential laden future, and space in the cups is our portal to time and the sacred liminal space in which we hold our hopes and intentions for the future, then the foreground deals with the past. The ground is beige and barren, with the rest of the card filled with blue, sky and water. The cups rest solidly on the bottom edge of the card.
On one hand this card is about walking away from a bad situation, expunging something harmful or dismissing something from the past that is of no more value. You’ve heard me quote it dozens of times, this again reminds me of that quote from the movie The Last Jedi where Kylo Ren says something akin to “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to. It’s the only way to become who you were meant to be.”
A change that profound should never be made rashly.
The past may be barren, lifeless ground, but it is ground just the same. It is solid. It exists. It happened, it ain’t changing, the memories are yours forever.
When you walk away from the past, you can’t change what happened but you have absolute control over how the past affects you. In the gap in the cups, in this present moment space we hold, we choose how much of the past we allow through to the present. When we let go of the past, the past events still exist unchanged, but the effect it has on us is transformed.
We aren’t letting go of the literal events of the past, we are releasing the mental and emotional hold those event have on our present moment – and in turn their hold on the future.
The doorway in time we see symbolized here goes two ways. It is a present moment liminal threshold where we can both plant seeds for the future AND stop the past from contaminating those seeds. We can let go of the past’s hold on us at the same time we can choose a new direction.
Please feel free to explore the archives. Type eight of cups or 8 of cups in the search bar on the right side of the page (laptop view) to see more thoughts about this card from old posts.
See you at the next sip!
Sage Sips / TaoCraft Tarot 
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