HP Tarot – 8C Despair

"The 8s are under the auspices of Mercury and share some of its quicksilvery mental acuity. The cards offer sudden insights, but also share a sense of nervousness and of mental hyper-sensitivity.

The Cups don’t cope very well with this kind of energy. The best scenario to describe the feeling of the card would be those times you wake up at four in the morning and a few minutes later you are thinking about all the problems and worries in your life, and the more you think the more awake you get and the more the problems seem to get blown out of all proportion until you reach a state of total mental despair and exhaustion, and you know that in a few hours you need to be awake for real and go to work. But what’s the point of it when your whole life is basically a mess and in the end you die anyway.

There is a reason why statistically most suicides happen in the early hours just before dawn…

So much negativity could be expressed in a whole cabinet full of assorted poisons. For the 8 of Cups that is a good image of how our emotional state looks like when our mind is playing this kind of trick on us."

I am sure Harry felt despair many times throughout the books, when he felt that no one was on his side in his fight against Lord Voldemort. Amazing how he was able to turn that negative energy into something positive, with Dumbledore's wise counsel.