The Page of Cups and his Fish

Oh i really like that interpretation!! I hope that it could work for every reading though...I thought of it as young emotion, innocent love, a young child, a book i have even describes it as a homosexual, but of course a picture is worth a thousand words.

Page of Cups

I love these interpretations. They are so "expectant" and full of hope and excitment!

I now look at the card in a new way. I can just feel the Page saying"well fancy that a fish, just when he thought he was going to get a drink of wine or something". Isnt that the same feeling you get when something unusual pops into your head during a reading.

I cant help but think that the colours in the cards are really important ....and here we have the page dressed in blue and red... and the orange boots... the orange being the colour of the relationship chakra ...(our relationship to our creativity and people and sexuality and most importatnly to our own spiritual path) Joseph Campbell would have said the boots represented our destiny...our path. He still standing on firm ground but close enough to the water to see it flowing past him.

Dont you just love the cards... they are amazing and each time I look full of somethign new.

The little fish of wisdom

The first time I really looked at this card my mind went in search of the archetypal story of the grail and the journey of the novice towards enlightenment from innocence. Along the way he burns his fingers on a roasting salmon that is not meant for him, puts his fingers in his mouth, and gains the first morsel of consciousness in the form of a wound. (Thank you Robert Johnston).

For me it is the little fish of wisdom in a gentler form - the page is looking at the fish as if to say - 'what can I learn from you, my little fish - where will you take me today?'

Tree Sprite said:

For me it is the little fish of wisdom in a gentler form - the page is looking at the fish as if to say - 'what can I learn from you, my little fish - where will you take me today?'

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This made me think of "The Once and Future King" where Merlin turns Arthur into different animals to teach him different things about being a king and about how one goes about when trying to pull a sword out of a stone. I recall him being turned into a fish, but I'm a bit fuzzy as to what exactly the lesson was (I went to my bookshelf to look it up only to realize I exchanged it for a copy of "Moby-dick" at the youth hostel in Puerto Iguazu... So if anyone's looking for a copy for free you know where to find it!). It's a lovely book anyway, I especially enjoy the bit about the geese.

Fulgour said:

The Pages would have come from other "families"
to serve in the Court, and I think The Page of Cups
is from the Sword family ~ look at how she stands,
as if in a fencing pose... and as for the Fish, since
she is unused to Cups, with her airy imagination she
has found a pleasant diversion. Besides, don't fish
need air to breathe, even if held in a smallish Cup?

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I knew that Pages came from other wealthy families to live as messengers and servants to the Squires of a different wealthy family, but had never thought about it in terms of each Page in the suit originating from a different suit - thank you for this insight!! How cool!

I think the fish probably represents an undine, a water elemental. The Rider-Waite deck tends to use animals to represent elementals: such as butterflies for sylphs, lizards for salamanders, and land animals for gnomes.

It is probably correct to consider Pages as female. They are seemingly depicted as male to preserve some sort of superficial continuity with the Valets of the Marseille deck. Just think of them as tomboys or transvestites.

Yeah, they're female. As the bottom most cards on the Tree of Life, the "Thrones of the Aces," sharing a place with all the Tens, they are the ones who receive all of creation. They're the Courts closest to us, normal people who use whatever the world has to offer and creating new things, thus being a starting point for the new cycle. Symbolically female attributes.

Also she's the bride of the Holy Guardian Angel. It don't remember where I read that in the Goldman Dawn all aspirants were symbolically female.

Plus, since we're talking about Waite and his Christian influences, the whole cup and fish thing could be an allusion to some Waite thing like the Grail and the Jesus fish or something like that.

The Page of cups and the fish

In the Grail legends, including the Wolfram version (Parzival), the Grail King fishes in a lake in order to be in less pain from his lance wound in the groin. Ugh. The wounded Grail King is called the "Fisher King." So the fish coming out of the cup might mean to remember the Grail/Christ. In a wider way of seeing it, the fish might be the Higher Self giving an important spiritual message. (Vishnu in an incarnation was a fish, an interesting symbolic connection.) I like to imagine what the fish would say if it could speak. Maybe "Remember Who you really are." Or "Your life is a fishy journey" (joke).

The story also tells that Monsalvatch, the Grail Castle, was built on top of giant onyx and its floor had embedded shapes of the ocean life. Lots fish symbolism in Christianity.