October occupies one of the most evocative passages in the Wheel of the Year. For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, the Autumn Equinox has passed; the brief equilibrium between light and darkness has already tipped, and each evening seems to arrive a little earlier than the last.
We are moving away from the harvest festivals of September toward Samhain at the end of the month, that ancient threshold modern Pagan traditions associate with death, ancestry, memory, and the thinning of boundaries between worlds. Whatever one believes about such boundaries literally, the season’s psychological truth is hard to miss. October has the atmosphere of a doorway. The world remains beautiful, sometimes extravagantly so, yet its beauty has begun to carry the unmistakable knowledge of disappearance.
Leaves flare red and gold because they are dying. The air smells of damp earth. Water gathers on windows, and gardens collapse inward. Things once hidden by summer’s abundance become visible again.
Into this strange, saturated landscape rides our Tarot of the Month, the Knight of Cups.
After September’s Eight of Disks, Prudence, this is quite a change. We spent last month considering conservation, patience, cultivation and the intelligence required to leave certain things alone. Crowley describes Prudence as a card in which strength can come from inactivity, especially when material resources are concerned. The seed is planted, the work has been done, and continual interference may only damage what needs time to develop.
October breaks the stillness.
Fire Moving Through Water
In the Thoth Tarot, the Knight of Cups is Fire of Water. This is crucial as he should never be reduced to the familiar image of the gentle romantic approaching with a chalice in his hand. Crowley gives us something far stranger and considerably less comfortable.
The Knight represents what Crowley calls the “swift passionate attack of rain and springs”, together with Water’s power to dissolve. His white horse leaps through a turbulent aquatic landscape while the Knight himself wears black armour and carries the Cup from which a crab emerges. Behind him appears the peacock, brilliant and iridescent. Everything is movement, shimmer, attraction and instability. This is Water refusing to remain still.
That distinction matters enormously for October.