Finding the Poison and the Antidote in the Hard Cards of Tarot

The medicine of the “hard cards” of tarot can be a bitter pill to swallow.

Have you ever heard a tarot reader reference the “medicine” of a tarot card? (I use it every now and again.)

It’s a phrase often used to help soften the blow of what can be seen as a challenging or unpleasant card. It’s a way of saying that there’s an important lesson to be learned from the experience, even if it’s uncomfortable. The medicine represents a form of healing that may be painful now but will be worth the pain down the road once the wound is mended.

But what does that really look like?

The 5 of Cups from the Color Outside the Lines edition of the Life Line Tarot.

Consider the 5 of Cups

What’s the “medicine” of the 5 of Cups? Shit happens, so get over it?

That’s certainly one way of reading the card, and one that I regularly see in practice. There’s a lot of emphasis on the need to pack up the pity party and recognize that, in the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition, there not all is lost because there are still two upright cups.

As an external observer, I’m usually fully on board with that advice because it’s logically true, but it ignores the querent’s all-too-real feeling represented by the card. And Cups are about feelings, so you can’t just logic your way out of them.

What if, instead of expecting brusque reason to push you through the card’s experience, you let yourself feel the 5 of Cups instead? Engage with the card on its own terms and explore what’s there that can help you counteract the poison. As in nature, the antidote may sometimes be growing right alongside the poison.

The Dirge of the 5 of Cups

In many a tarot reading, the 5 of Cups will signify grief, loss, and mourning. It’s a card of painful and often unexpected endings. And that’s no surprise given the card’s astrological correspondence (Mars in Scorpio) and the astrologically associated major arcana: the Tower (Mars) and Death (Scorpio). Talk about a brutal pairing.

For an overview of all the astrological correspondences for the minor arcana, see “Exploring the Minor Arcana through Astrology, Part 1.”

When something comes to an end, especially before we are ready for it, grief is a normal experience. Mourning is a way of showing love for what is gone. That’s natural, and how we process it is not rational. Sure, life hasn’t ended for us in these moments. But it can feel like it.

So let yourself express that feeling. Remember that it’s temporary—this is not some call to permanent sadness—but don’t try to just “get over it.”

Let yourself sing a sad song.

Let yourself cry, like ugly-cry cry.

Tap into those feelings and let that river of the Rider-Waite-Smith card run freely.

Hang your head in gloom while you’re in the shower and let that water just wash right over you.

These are ways to embrace the feeling of the card and embody it. Embodying your tarot cards helps you work with their energy. And in the case of “hard cards,” it will help you move through the energy of the card.

You may also want to complete a tarot reading related to the card, such as the “When the Cups are Draining” spread I created for the 5 of Cups.

Forgetting the Fight

Trying to fight the feelings of an evocative tarot card is like trying to fight life. Unless you were looking for a creative prompt, the card probably appeared for a reason related to you (or your querent’s) lived experience. It’s not just a random card to intellectualize.

Fighting life is exhausting. What’s even the end point there?

Fighting the energy of your tarot cards is just as exhausting. And worse when it’s a challenging experience like the 5 of Cups, you’re prolonging the experience. Mourning is part of a process. Disappointment is part of a process. Feeling butt-hurt is part of a process. Let it play out. But don’t let it fester.

The water of the Cups needs to flow at some point. If you don’t rinse those Cups out, gross things grow in them. What is in the Cups is consumed or poured out, and then it is replenished. That’s how the Cups are meant to work.

Searching for the Antidote

When you’ve let yourself embody the card’s energy, and you’ve gone through some of the process to actually feel the feelings, it’s time to look for the antidote.

You can do that by entering the world of the tarot card. I’ve been talking about path-working since first introducing my sensory cue exercises, but if you’re unfamiliar with it, the idea is to recreate the world of the tarot card in your mind and then enter it in order to experience what you discover there that may or may not have been in the card’s illustration. The idea behind this tradition in tarot is fairly mystical, but it has everyday psychological applications as well.

One way to see the 5 of Cups is as a midway point between the 4 of Cups and the 6 of Cups. In both cards in the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition, a Cup is offered. In the 5 of Cups, no one is offering anything. So why don’t you step into the world of the card and comfort that crying figure?

Imagine yourself as you pick up those two upright cups that still have something in them and offer one to the mourner. Take a moment to comfort them, and then offer a toast to what comes next. Don’t ignore the fact that they’re weeping. And don’t judge them for their feelings and pain. Be a witness to their grief, and be a guide to helping them release that before they celebrate what they already have and what could come next. Because what’s so hard about the 5 of Cups moments in our lives is that they can leave you numb and uncertain what to do next.

In these moments, it’s so helpful to not feel alone. With you as the path-worker in this fictional world, you’ll be there for them with your empathy and compassion. You’ll have been in that energy that they’re feeling through your embodiment of the card’s energy, so you’ll know those feelings personally. Those feelings don’t go away just because you raise a glass in cheers, but they don’t have to be all-consuming. In helping this fictional mourner process and see what comes next, you may be creating a special healing “medicine” for your own experience.

Metabolizing the Toxins

Path-working in the card that feels like poison may offer you an antidote, but you don’t remove toxins by just dealing with negative symptoms. They must leave your body in some way. You either purge them or metabolize them.

(Please keep in mind that I am talking about dealing with metaphorical toxins, not physiological processes. If you’ve ingested literal toxins, you may need medical assistance. That is not me.)

In the examples of crying and singing based on what you find in the card imagery or path-working, these are expressions of feeling. In my metaphor, I would consider these forms of purging toxins.

But you might instead use the hard card’s properties to metaphorically metabolize the negative experience, helping it dissipate through your body and fuel you naturally. It’s very easy to get stuck in these kinds of feelings and let that Cups energy just keep holding the gunk in.

Of course, you can turn to path-working again. You can visualize or otherwise imagine the negative experiences represented by the card being broken down into their constituent parts.

But why not explore something different? What about creating a “potion” to help you deal with your “poison?”

For this, I would look to whatever correspondences I have for the relevant card. Correspondences are a form of sympathetic magic, whereby one thing stands in or affects a similar or related other thing. For example, the flower bleeding heart is a correspondence for heartache because it looks like a series of wounded hearts. (Don’t consume bleeding heart. It can be physiologically toxic.) You then use the correspondence to create something relevant, such as an artwork or a talisman or a tonic. The correspondence can be very simple, such as water being a correspondence for the suit of Cups, but it can also be more specific. Specificity is helpful in magic.

If you’re looking for specific court card correspondences, you’ll find a nice selection in the first part of Awaken the Court Cards: A workbook to bring the court cards to life, along with correspondences for each of the suits in general and for the court ranks in general.

Let sympathetic magic provide you with a metabolic boost and help get things working a little faster. Since astrological correspondences are relatively easy to identify, I would look for ideas based in the astrological correspondences of the card. As I mentioned above, the 5 of Cups is associated with Mars in Scorpio, so I would look to Mars correspondences and Scorpio.

If you’re wondering why we would look to correspondences for the card that houses the painful poison we’re trying to metabolize, remember that you can sometimes find the antidote growing alongside the poison. In this case, Mars and Scorpio provide a lot of energy to get things moving. And even though Scorpio seems pretty toxic with its scorpion tail stinger, many astringents “sting” as they work to remove toxins. So I’m okay with using both of those as magical inspiration.

Revitalizing the 5 of Cups with a tasty salad

Doing a quick online search, I find that Mars is related to things like coffee and nettle and black pepper and anemone, among many other things. I like coffee too much to put random things in it, I don’t want to deal with nettles, and I don’t know where I’ll find anemone or if it’s consumable. After all, I’m not a trained herbalist, but I do know what I can buy in my grocery store. And personally, I would rather make a meal than make a potion. (I am a Taurus.)

I definitely have black pepper, so looking for more edible correspondences for Mars, I find coriander and basil and radish. It turns out that pepper, basil, radish, and coriander are also associated with Scorpio, which is probably because Scorpio is traditionally ruled by Mars.

But I don’t want only Martial correspondences. I don’t need Tower-level clearing. I find a Scorpio correspondence for raspberry leaf, which makes me think of raspberries. (No, they’re not the same thing. But magic is largely about intention.) I’ll want some more moderating influences beyond that, but I don’t need to look for any specifics.

Instead, I search for a recipe that includes basil, coriander, and raspberry. And before long, I have a list of things for a salad featuring basil, coriander, and raspberry, as well as radishes and pepper (convenient coincidences). I also like that it uses arugula because arugula is the Scorpio of greens. It looks refreshing and watery, but then it bites back, just like the Mars-ruled water sign.

And to help soften and soothe the heat of Mars in Scorpio and not just ignite my already fried emotional state, there will also be a good load of peaches and goat cheese thrown in.

If I wanted to, I could look up the correspondences for those, but I intuitively feel that they’re soft and nurturing (Venusian) to counter the heavy energy of Mars. Even if they weren’t in a compendium of correspondences I have, I know from being alive that milk and peaches are both associated with women’s bodies and thus appropriate to counter some of Mars’s rough edges.

Planning for the card

Now, it’s unlikely that someone who is in the depths of their mourning is going to look for a Mars- and Scorpio-inspired salad recipe. I fully get that. That’s why the embodiment is important. You can’t just ignore the feeling. But when there’s a break in the emotional void, it’s good to have a strategy.

sold out

The Hard Cards of Tarot [Live Course]

$150.00

That’s one of several exercises that I will be teaching in my upcoming course on the Hard Cards of Tarot. If you found these exercises and examples helpful, you’ll love what we can uncover together in the course.