🌿 This week in Sage Leaves… 🌿
Greetings, wise ones, welcome to this week’s Sage Leaves. The Queen of Cups is the Jungian archetype of emotional containment in transgenerational healing, holding the family’s grief without drowning, and she steadies you as old Samhain arrives on November 13th, when Mercury and Venus turn direct and the old growth falls away. Alongside this exploration, you will also find the Tarotscope for November 10-16, 2026, offering guidance for the days ahead.
The Queen of Cups Card As Jungian Archetype:
The Jungian Archetype of Sovereign Emotional Depth
She is one of the most quietly powerful figures in the entire tarot deck. The Queen of Cups sits on her throne at the water’s edge, holding a covered chalice in both hands with the focus and absorbed attention of someone who is interested in what it contains. Her action does not perform emotional sensitivity. She is not managing her feelings for anyone else’s comfort. She is simply present with what is in the cup, and that quality of unhurried interior attention is the heart of her archetype.
In Jungian psychology, the Queen of Cups carries what Jung called the fully realized anima: the feminine principle of the psyche that has moved beyond the earlier stages of emotional reactivity and idealization and has arrived at something genuinely mature. She is the part of the psyche that has learned to feel deeply without drowning, to hold the emotional reality of others without losing its own ground, and to sit with what lives in the depths of the unconscious without being terrified by what it finds there.
The covered chalice is the key to understanding her archetype. She is not showing you what is in the cup. She is not avoiding doing this; rather it is her discernment. The Queen of Cups has learned that not everything that surfaces from the emotional depths needs to be immediately displayed, processed out loud, or shared with whoever happens to be nearby. Some of what the cup contains is sacred, private, still forming. She holds it. She tends it. She waits until she understands what it is before she decides what to do with it.
“The Queen of Cups is not asking you to feel less. She is showing you
what it looks like to feel everything and
still know exactly where you end and the feeling begins.”
This is the developmental achievement her archetype describes: the capacity to contain. In Jungian terms, containment is one of the psyche’s most sophisticated capacities, and it is also one of the rarest. Most people either suppress what they feel, which is not containment but avoidance, or they express it immediately and without filter, which is not authenticity but flooding. The Queen of Cups does neither. She holds.
Her Jungian shadow is the figure who mistakes emotional absorption for emotional intelligence: who feels everything so intensely that she loses her own edges, who tends everyone else’s emotional life at the expense of her own, who has confused being deeply sensitive with having no boundary between herself and what she feels.
The shadow Queen of Cups is often described as psychic or empathic, and she is, but she is also frequently exhausted and quietly resentful in ways she cannot fully name because she has been holding everyone else’s cup and neglecting her own.
The gift of her archetype, fully realized, is the rarest thing: emotional depth that is also emotionally sovereign.
Reflection Prompt:
The Queen of Cups holds her covered chalice with both hands and unhurried attention: where in your emotional life are you currently flooding when you could be containing, or suppressing when you could be holding, and what would it take to develop the Queen of Cups’ capacity to sit with what is in the cup long enough to actually understand what it is?
🌿Sage Leaves Weekly Tarotscope
Tarotscope for November 10-16, 2026
This week carries one Major Arcana, one court card, and four Swords, which means your mind does most of the talking from the first day to the last. The Knight of Wands rides in on the leftover momentum of last week, and the Swords then form a chain in which a wound becomes a quarrel, the quarrel becomes indecision, and the indecision becomes a sleepless night. Death stands in the middle of that chain as the one card with the power to clear the ground. Mercury and Venus both turn direct on Friday, so the sky begins to untangle itself at the same moment the cards ask you to let something go. Cups are entirely absent.
The Cards of the Week
Tuesday: Knight of Wands | Venus Rx in Scorpio Squares Pluto in Aquarius
Wednesday: 3 of Swords | Moon in Pisces trine Venus in Scorpio
Thursday: 5 of Swords | Moon in Pisces trine Mercury in Scorpio
Friday: Death | Sun Enters Scorpio ; Sun in Scorpio conjunct Venus in Scorpio
Saturday: 2 of Swords | Mercury Retrogrades in Scorpio
Sunday: 6 of Pentacles | Venus Retrograde Enters Libra
Monday: 9 of Swords | Taurus Full Moon; Sun in Scorpio squares Pluto in Aquarius
Tuesday: Knight of Wands
Tuesday opens with the Knight of Wands as Venus in Libra sextiles Mars in Leo. He gallops back into the energy of last week, and the easy sextile between Venus and Mars gives his charge a warm, attractive quality that can hide the direction he is traveling. Fire and charm work well together when they are pointed somewhere useful, but riding at full speed toward what is already behind you only repeats it faster. Tuesday asks you to notice whether your enthusiasm is carrying you toward something new or back into an old argument.
Wednesday: 3 of Swords
Wednesday brings the 3 of Swords with no significant astrological aspects. A heart is pierced by three swords beneath a rain cloud, and because the sky is quiet, nothing softens the image or distracts you from it. The card does not say who threw the swords; it only insists that the hurt is real and deserves to be named plainly. Wednesday is a day to let a sorrow be as large as it actually is, since a pain that goes unacknowledged tends to come out sideways later in the week.
Thursday: 5 of Swords
Thursday delivers the 5 of Swords as the Moon in Sagittarius trines Jupiter in Leo. The winner gathers the swords and glances back at the defeated men, and in this sequence that glance invites a question about whether Wednesday’s wound is what started the fight. Sagittarius is blunt and Jupiter in Leo is expansive, so the trine makes it easy to feel righteous and to speak loudly. A quarrel won this way usually costs you something you valued more than the point, so ask yourself what you were really protecting when you picked up the swords.
Friday: Death
Friday arrives with Death as Mercury turns direct in Scorpio and Venus turns direct in Libra. The skeleton rides away from the carnage and leaves a cleared field behind him, which suits a day when both your thinking and your sense of what you value stop moving backward. Conversations and relationship questions that stalled over the autumn begin to move again. This card rarely means a literal ending; here it describes the release of a pattern, the cycle of wound, fight, and aftermath that the earlier cards have just shown you. Friday asks what you are willing to leave on the field.
Saturday: 2 of Swords
Saturday brings the 2 of Swords as the Moon in Capricorn sextiles the Sun in Scorpio. She is the only figure in the week who faces you, and she cannot see you, because the blindfold is still in place. The Sun in Scorpio favors honesty about what lies beneath the surface, and the practical Capricorn Moon supports taking a clear look at your options, so the sky is offering real help with seeing. With Death having cleared the ground, the choice she has been avoiding now stands in plain view, and the only question left is what you already know.
Sunday: 6 of Pentacles
Sunday offers the 6 of Pentacles as the Moon in Aquarius sextiles Saturn in Aries. A merchant weighs out coins for two figures kneeling at his feet, and Aquarius brings its concern for the community while Saturn insists that the terms be fair. This is the only card in the week that turns your attention toward other people, which fits the Nodal Axis in Leo and Aquarius and its slow movement away from self-absorption. Share what you have in a way that builds no debt, and remember that you may also be the one who receives.
Monday: 9 of Swords
Monday closes with the 9 of Swords as Mars conjoins Jupiter in Leo. The figure sits upright in bed with his face in his hands, looking toward the future, and the nine swords hang on the wall behind him rather than in his body, which is a detail worth remembering. Mars conjunct Jupiter inflates whatever it touches, so a modest worry can look enormous after midnight. Monday asks you to compare the size of the problem at three in the morning with its size at noon.
Themes of the Week
The week traces a chain of cause and effect: a hurt on Wednesday turns into a victory that costs something on Thursday, a clearing on Friday, an avoided decision on Saturday, and an anxious night on Monday. Death is the hinge, and it falls on the day Mercury and Venus finish their retrograde journeys, so the timing favors endings that you choose over endings that happen to you. Saturn remains retrograde in Aries for roughly another month, which keeps asking you to examine the structures you rely on. The 6 of Pentacles gives the week its one hopeful direction: outward toward other people.
Suit Composition and Absence
Swords dominate with four cards, Wands and Pentacles appear once each, and Cups are entirely absent. Without Cups, the grief in the 3 of Swords has no vessel to hold it and no comforting figure to share it with, so the emotional support the week needs has to come from outside the cards: a friend, a counselor, or a night of real rest. That absence also explains why the mind becomes so loud, since feeling has no suit of its own in which to be heard.
Numerology and Recurrences
The numbers present are 12 (Knight of Wands), 3 (3 of Swords), 5 (5 of Swords), 13 (Death), 2 (2 of Swords), 6 (6 of Pentacles), and 9 (9 of Swords). Four primes appear: 2, 3, 5, and 13, and all four fall on cards that involve loss, conflict, indecision, or change, so the parts of the week that resist simplification are the parts that hurt. Four odd numbers against three even ones leave the week slightly unsettled, which suits its closing image. No cards recur this week.
Conclusion
The week begins in momentum and ends in worry, and the distance between them is the work of Death, who clears away the quarrel while the sky releases Mercury and Venus from their backward motion. What you do with that clearing is a matter of choice. You can lift the blindfold of the 2 of Swords on Saturday, accept the fair exchange of the 6 of Pentacles on Sunday, and meet Monday’s anxiety with a clearer head than the 9 of Swords has. Or you can ride the Knight of Wands back into the same field and start the chain again.
Reflection:
The 2 of Swords is the only figure facing you this week, and she holds a blindfold she could remove at any time: what decision have you been avoiding since the quarrel of the 5 of Swords, and what would you say about it if you trusted that Death has already cleared the ground for an honest answer?
The Queen of Cups in transgenerational healing work is the Jungian archetype of the container: the part of the psyche that can hold what the family could never speak of without being swept away by it. She sits at the water’s edge with her chalice closed, and her closed chalice is a sign of discernment rather than avoidance, since she knows that some grief must be understood before it is shared. That is a rare skill in a lineage that has learned to either flood or go numb.
She is the right figure for this week. Old Samhain arrives on November 13th, the same day Mercury turns direct in Scorpio and Venus turns direct in Libra, so conversations and relationships that stalled in the autumn begin to move again. Saturn remains retrograde in Aries for about another month, while Neptune, Uranus, and Chiron also move backward, and together they keep asking what you are still carrying out of habit. November is a month of death and dying, and the clearing of old growth makes room for what winter will protect until spring.
In clinical herbalism, this is the time to harvest the last sage from the garden before a hard frost. Sage is a traditional remedy for a sore throat, when steeped as a strong tea and gargled, and it has a long record of drying excess secretions; it is best used in short stretches, and it should be avoided in pregnancy. Cut it, bundle it, and hang it to dry for the winter.
Take care, be well, and good-bye for now,
—Dr. Winkler
That’s it for this week! Look for Sage Leaves in your inbox on Tuesday afternoons (North American time.) We look forward to exploring more about Tarot, Healing and more! Take care, be well, and good-bye for now!