Scrying the Thoth Tarot: The Ten of Cups

“There is the dove, and there is the serpent. Choose ye well! He, my prophet, hath chosen, knowing the law of the fortress, and the great mystery of the House of God." Liber AL, I: 57.

The Vision

A shaft of beautiful sunlight shone upon a golden cup filled with water. Around it, a serpent was entwined, its body spinning around the cup’s base until it detached itself from it and ascended up the beam of light until it reached the sun, which it encircled with its body. Once it was there, streams of venom dripped down from its fangs like dew and its tail dropped down into the waters of the sea far below. I understood the serpent’s venom to be the source of life and its spinning motion to be the driving factor behind the motion and activity that comes with that life. The light that shone from the sun that the serpent entwined itself around glimmered upon a golden crown that I wore on my head, and from those rays, which mingled with the serpents venom-dew, a dove appeared and descended onto my crown.

Notes

Here, the origin of the serpent sun seen in the vision of the 10 of Swords is explained. It represented the rising force of the Kundalini, which when attributed to the Hebrew word ‘Neshesch,’ takes on the same gematric value as the redemptive solar force as the ‘Messiach’ or Messiah. This equality of force is portrayed by the Unity portrayed in their binding together as one entity, which is symbolised by the image of the Orphic Egg. 

“I am the secret Serpent coiled about to spring: in my coiling there is joy." Liber AL, II: 26

The serpent’s revolving motion around the cup represents the force of the Shekinah, the manifestation of the divine feminine in Malkuth, which is depicted as a force carried up and down the tree of life by the Merkabah Chariot, whose wheels are spun by angels known as the Galgalim and Ophanim. This revolving motion is the source of all energy and life in Malkuth, and is evidenced in the orbital motions of celestial bodies, the spirals of DNA, the Kundalini, the Caduceus and the naturally occurring mathematical principles such as the Golden Mean and the Fibonacci sequence. When it the ascends force from the Cup of Earth to wrap itself around the Sun, it takes on the symbolism of the Gnostic god Aion, which represents the cyclical nature of time, the Zodiac and the boundaries of the Cosmos. Its dripping venom is equated with the descending waters of alchemical ‘dew’ which symbolises the Waters of the Great Mother filling the vessels of the Tree of Life until they culminate in the material essence of Malkuth. The dove that appeared towards the end of the vision represents the force of the Shekinah or Holy Spirit descending from the Supernals to enter the Crown chakra, which was here represented by a golden crown that shines with the light of the Sun.