THE NINE OF CUPS, LORD OF MATERIAL HAPPINESS

   Your ally sits on a bench with a smile on his face. A table laden with golden cups forms a semicircle around him. To some, the smile on your ally's face and the abundance of cups might suggest happiness achieved through materialism and hedonism, but your ally is feeling the influences of the Moon and Jupiter in Pisces. Your ally is not surrounded by a banquet or emblems of wealth and power but by golden cups that, like the grail, represent spirit manifesting in matter. Your ally’s brand of hedonism, in other words, leads to joyful spiritual inebriation in the material realm. Your ally realizes that the physical senses are not evil but can be channels for spiritual enlightenment. The physical senses and the subtle senses can both be affected at the same time, the way a piece of music can ravish the ear and at the same time have a profound effect on the emotions to the point of awakening spiritual awareness. Jupiter represents expansive, orderly development, which, when associated with Pisces and the Moon, suggests the expansion of awareness through exploration of the subconsious and the imagination to achieve a higher state of spiritual understanding. In other words, the influence of Pisces and the Moon suggests that material happiness is not just linked to possessions but to an opening of the subtle senses and a plunge into the subconscious, leading to the expansion of consciousness that occurs through the exploration of the senses, the emotions, the intellect, and the imagination together. Your ally is like a ritual magician who uses the imagination and engages the senses with incense and music and color and dance to concentrate the emotions and the intellect on a spiritual force in order to experience inner qualities such as magnificence and harmony (associated with Jupiter), with the aim of living a more abundant life.

CORRESPONDING COLOR: Violet.

Reversed: lack of inner joy or the ability to appreciate the link of the physical senses with spiritual understanding; depression, constant dissatisfaction