The Knight of Cups from the Rider-Waite-Smith deck: The poet-knight on a slow, rhythmic quest for the ideal, carrying the chalice of the spirit through the landscape of the soul.

The Eight of Cups from the Rider-Waite-Smith deck: A figure turns his back on the cups of his past, embarking on a moonlit pilgrimage toward the rugged heights of the spirit.

Draw a line on a map of southern England from the ancient hill fort at Avebury to Glastonbury Tor, and continue it northeast through the church at Bury St. Edmunds, and you pass through a remarkable number of ancient sacred sites. Extend the same line further and it runs through churches, standing stones, and landscape features that ancient peoples — quite independently, across thousands of years — chose to mark, worship at, or build upon.

Every major religious tradition has its sacred mountain — and the mountain is sacred not merely by convention but by the structure of human spiritual experience. The mountain is the axis mundi: the point where heaven and earth meet, the center of the world, the place where the divine descends and the human ascends. Its height places it above the ordinary horizontal world, in the realm of clouds, lightning, and stars. Its summit is inaccessible to ordinary life — you must make an effort, a journey, a sacrifice of ease and security to reach it. These qualities make the mountain the natural image of spiritual aspiration in every tradition: you must climb. The easy path does not go there. And what you find at the summit, if you reach it, cannot be described to those who have not made the journey — it can only be pointed toward, from below, by the mountain's summit piercing the sky.