Nostalgia in the Tarot: The Six of Cups and the Function of Longing

(Based on the representations found on the Rider-Waite-Smith deck.)

Tarot confession: I’ve always dismissed the Six of Cups as a fluff card. There, I said it. The saccharine image of a hooded child stooping to present an even smaller, albeit older-looking, figure with a cup of flowers never struck me as particularly weighty. Childhood memories, old friends, remembrances of things past — I typically gave this card short shrift, assigning it a lower level of import in the Minor Arcana’s symbolic hierarchy. Now, however, I need to issue an earnest mea culpa.

I’m part way through James Hillman’s The Force of Character. In it, I came across a reference to nostalgia, drawn from T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets. In the second quartet — and I do recommend reading all four — Eliot writes:

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).