Cups

I’ve been preparing for a guest post over at Tarot Eon later this month. While exploring some search results I stumbled upon an insight which has helped me explore Jung’s definition of the feeling function.

In an explanation of Minor Arcana of the Tarot, the suit of the cups is linked to the feeling function (whereas the other suits: swords/thinking, wands/intuition, coins/sensation).

“The suit of Cups corresponds to the West direction or wind; the Water element and the color, Blue; the Autumn (Summer to some) season; the Binah or Creative world of the Kaballah; the feminine yin energy; lunar and tidal cycles; and the Jungian function of feelings.” Tarot Suits : The Meaning of the Cups Guest Author – June Kaminski

At once it stuck me how right the symbol of the cup fits the feeling function. Often the confusion around the feeling function, especially for rational types, equates this capacity of the ego to the emotions.

“Feeling has to do with the expression of the value which we give to that which we perceive.  When we say that we do not like this table or that the table appeals to us, we have given a personal value to what we have perceived. “  Edward Whitmont, The Symbolic Quest, pg. 142

What was useful for me with the image of the cup is simple.  The feeling function acts like a container,  clearly a container that often holds emotion. But it is also what gets exercised when we respond to a work of art.  We can imagine the art work getting held in consciousness like a cup, regardless if that work is a painting or a three hour theatrical performance.   And we feel the value of what we hold in the cup…what a dismal film, such an amazing ballet, etc.

The symbolic significance of the cup emerges from prehistorical times.

The most ancient evidence of the production of art predates the generally accepted earliest dates for the appearance of modern humans. Cup marks and a meandering line were etched into a sandstone cave in India two or three hundred thousand years ago. The Dawn of Prehistoric Rock Art by James Q. Jacobs

My continued reflections led me to pull a book off my shelf which documents an interesting archeological dig of a cremation site on the shore of a small lake in southeastern Massachusetts that dates back 4,000 years.  What emerges when reading about the excavations of the Wapanucket site is how the various graves and pits scattered in that area, created a series of cups in the earth.  Many of the burial pits were covered with red ochre pigment, another symbolically charged ritual material that is found in prehistoric sites throughout the world.  To mix the pigment, one of the artifacts from the site was a rock cup.

While this reflection has meandered a bit, let me tie up the various threads through personal experience.  It is how I hold those who have passed, my deceased ancestors and friends, where I most clearly experience the cup of the feeling function activated in myself.