Deuce of Cups, seal of grace

The Deuce of Cups came up in the comments on "Hello. Good-bye. Shoot this man." In the dream recounted there, three "cups" was the minimum order for Red Tart. This made me think of the Three of Cups Tarot card. But then Bill left a comment that said in part:

I think the Cups associated with your dream and the Red Tart may be a reference to such chosen vessels. There will be at least 3 - maybe more, but that is the minimum. . . . My guess is, and has been, that the Lion Head is one of these Vessels.

This made the Deuce of Cups relevant, since the Rider-Waite version of that card shows two cups and a lion's head -- exactly what you would expect if, as Bill says, there are three Cups but one of them is a Lion Head. Bill is not at all familiar with Tarot cards (though I suppose this blog is gradually changing that), and I'm sure his comment was not in any way influenced by Waite's design.

The Tarot uses the Italian suit system, in which the suit of Cups corresponds to the Anglo-French suit of Hearts. This is a historical fact but is also something that is explicitly mentioned several times in Last Call, the Tim Powers novel I recently read at the behest of the sync fairies. The most prominent card in that novel is the Page of Cups or Jack of Hearts. There is a scene in the novel where someone throws Tarot cards, and the Page of Cups card hits someone in the eye.

This afternoon, I was passing through my school's lobby and saw one of the students sitting at a table there playing with a deck of poker cards. There were two black pip cards face-up on the table, and I thought I'd take note of them and treat them as being potentially a naturally occurring Tarot spread. Before I could get close enough to identify the two cards, though, the boy unexpectedly took another card from the deck and threw it at me, narrowly missing my eye. This was quite out of character, and there was no sign of a motive. He didn't seem to be angry or to think it was funny or anything. He just threw a card at me like it was a perfectly normal thing to do.

We both looked down at the floor, where the card he had thrown was now lying face-up. It was the Deuce of Hearts.

I remembered that the word deuce had recently come up here, in "The Cora Ylang-Ylang experiment," where one of Cora Ylang-Ylang's novels was called Deuce Day. The other novel mentioned -- O Friday, My Friday! -- had by a rather roundabout train of thought made me think of Ritchie Valens. The title obviously alludes to Walt Whitman's poem O Captain! My Captain! about the death of Lincoln. In "La Bamba," Valens repeats "Soy capitán, soy capitán," and in "American Pie" the three victims of the Day the Music Died are referred to as the members of the Trinity, with Valens being the Son, who died on Good Friday (even though Valens himself died on a Tuesday). Revisiting that post put "La Bamba" in my head, but I found that, under the influence of the recent reminder about the Spanish word for seal, I kept mentally replacing poca with foca in the lyrics:

Se necesita una foca de gracia

Una foca de gracia

Pa' mí, pa' ti, arriba, y arriba

Not "a little grace" but "a seal of grace" is needed for me and you. It makes no sense in Spanish, where foca can refer only to the marine mammal, but in English a "seal of grace" is understandable, as the scriptures repeatedly refer to the redeemed as being "sealed."