Sherlock Holmes Card of the Day: Six of Analysis (Cups)

The Sherlock Holmes Card of the Day is:

SIX OF ANALYSIS

(6 of Cups)

In The Sherlock Holmes Tarot by John Matthews and Wil Kinghan (Sterling Ethos), the suit of Analysis (represented by a magnifying glass) is comparable to the suit of Cups in traditional decks.

The quotation chosen to represent the entire suit of Analysis is: “There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically” from A Study in Scarlet. This comment is made, as you might expect, by Sherlock Holmes himself. It is prefaced by the following: “In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backwards. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practise it much. In the every-day affairs of life it is more useful to reason forwards, and so the other comes to be neglected.” I love that.

The Holmesian Wisdom for the Six of Analysis is: “I watched the little working gangs as once I watched the criminal world” from His Last Bow. The card shows Sherlock Holmes tending a row of bee hives, dressed in a beekeeper’s hat and veil. The scene takes place after Holmes has retired from active sleuthing and has set up a bee farm in Sussex. He studies the behavior of bees the way he once studied human nature.

Although “analysis” may seem more like a Swords/Air quality than Water/Cups, the creators of this deck refer to the “leap of intuition” that often enables Holmes to “connect one detail with another.” Intuition is very much a Water quality, and it can add much to our efforts to interpret something logically or mentally.

Keys for this card, upright, are: “rest and retirement, rediscovery of one’s roots, ancestral memories, the pleasure of remembered times, a sense of tradition.” Reversed meanings: “future events and prospects, promise of better times to come, plans that might fail.”

The book that accompanies this deck also provides interpretations for each card under the headings “The Game” and “The Fog.” The former elaborates on the upright keys, while the latter expands on reversed meanings. Examples from “The Game” for the Six of Analysis: “nostalgia for simpler or happy times… anniversaries that recall other times… volunteer service to others.” Examples from “The Fog”: “being stuck in the past… steering by outworn traditions, memory of anniversaries, sometimes painful…old events trigger difficult memories.”