The Six of Cups raises themes of family and ancestry and where we each come from, specifically in relation to how it these things inform your own life now. It asks us to explore what it feels like to be ‘rooted’ – that may be physically in a space, or it may be in a culture, tradition or lineage that we are part of.
Annette Calder is a third generation ‘showie’ who has been travelling with her laughing clowns for the past 57 years.
Her family is part of a tight travelling community of stallholders that belong to the Victorian Showmen’s Guild, supplying sideshow alley entertainment to agricultural shows across the state.
The Six of Cups represents innocence, nostalgia, and positive thinking. The card has an overall feel of childhood and nostalgia. It embodies feeling free and pure and allowing your past experiences to guide you down new paths.
The Six of Cups from the Legrande Circus and Sideshow Tarot helps add another dimension to the story of this woman who has spent so many years travelling to Agricultural Shows in regional areas of Victoria, Australia. Annette was, as so many Showies are, born into this business. Her parents and grandparents all worked the shows. Sideshow stall holding is often a long-held, multi-generational family affair with many stallholders being related.
It’s no surprise then that the Six of Cups can often be attributed to our inner child and how we tackle our role as both the parent and the child. Often when the Six of Cups appears in a Tarot reading, we are directed to that inner child and what it’s trying to tell us. Of course, even if you are not into reversals it is prudent to remember that sometimes the things that happened to us as children can manifest in our adult lives in unpleasant ways. It could be trauma from neglect or abuse, a specific event that happened that changed our beliefs about ourselves or changed the way we see the world.
Understanding Wisdom of the Past
Nostalgia, memories, childhood, familiarity, rose-colored glasses, stuck in the past
Go through your decks and find some Six of Cups and all the Pages. Study the various versions! Consider what, from the past, you want to examine. What other selves are to be found there? Take the opportunity to work with your younger self.
It may help to do this spread by Hermits Mirror and then journal. The creator explains that when he made it, it was was geared toward understanding wisdom from any of the past versions of ourselves that live within us.
Memory by Zora Bernice May Cross
Late, late last night, when the whole world slept,
Along to the garden of dreams I crept.
And I pulled the bell of an old, old house
Where the moon dipped down like a little white mouse.
I tapped the door and I tossed my head:
“Are you in, little girl? Are you in?” I said.
And while I waited and shook with cold
Through the door tripped me—-just eight years old.
I looked so sweet with my pigtails down,
Tied up with a ribbon of dusky brown,
With a dimpled chin full of childish charme,
And my old black dolly asleep in my arms.
I sat me down when I saw myself,
And I told little tales of a moonland elf.
I laughed and sang as I used to do
When the world was ruled by Little Boy Blue.
Then I danced with a toss and a twirl
And said: “Now have you been a good, good girl?
Have you had much spanking since you were Me?
And does it feel fine to be twenty-three?”
I kissed me then, and I said farewell,
For I’ve earned more spanks than I dared to tell,
And Eight must never see Twenty-three
As she peeps through the door of Memory.
Waltzing With Matilda's 