by Dee Rapposelli

Created on: November 23, 2009

Looking to the West: The Ritual Cup

The ritual cup is a magical and mystical symbol and a tool important to both pagan and Christian spirituality and mysticism. The cup represents the element of water. As a ritual tool representing water, it rests on the western side of the altar. As a meditation on the water element, the cup is associated with water, emotion, sensuality, intuition and the deeper consciousness, and also selflessness, sacrifice, and the pathways between worlds.

In Wicca and neopagan traditions, it represents the Goddess. As a representation of the Goddess, it has a prominent place on the pagan altar. That place is left of center, which is the area associated with the moon and the divine feminine. In ancient times, the cup was an item associated with both the sacrifice of the dying and resurrecting god and the potential for ecstatic gnosis in states of liminal consciousness.

In the second part of Book ABA (Book IV), the mage Aleister Crowley refers to the "Magick Cup" as a symbol of the magician's Understanding. He compares it with one of the sephira of the Kabbalist Tree of Life called Binah. Binah is associated with the feminine/lunar polarity and with the planet Saturn. Simply put, the "Understanding" or "Knowledge" implied by Binah concerns that of duality and limitation in contrast to union in the divine reality. It is the knowledge about the hard realities about life but also the assurance that there is a way to enlightenment in the divine source.

Crowley says: "This Cup is full of bitterness, and of blood, and of intoxication." On the one hand, the statement refers to the cup's association with the sephira Binah. On the other, it refers to its association with the unconscious-the place of dreams and unwieldy thought processes. In achieving self-mastery, the magical worker must strive to know the self and master personal consciousness instead of being mastered or led astray by it. In practice, this can be like walking a razor's edge teetering between self-actualization and insanity. Like in Dionysian rites, the path is initiatic and typically of a "shamanic" or "Tantric" type.

Crowley's statement also refers to sacrifice wherein life gives of itself for life. This concept is strongly seen in the Christian, Mithraic, Bacchic and other pagan mysteries.

Cauldron and Grail Mysteries

In Gnostic and mystical Greco-Roman/Middle Eastern paganism at the turn of the first millennium CE (the same time as the emergence of early Christianity),

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