Historical Archetypes & Myths in Film and TV: Eve’s Bayou, The 3 of Cups and Death
an in-depth exploration of the underlying symbolism in the movies we love.
welcome to the second installment of the historical archetypes & myths in film and tv article series. in this article, we will be analyzing the film eve’s bayou directed by kasi lemmons in comparison to the 3 of cups tarot card. if you haven’t already, i encourage you to read the first installment here because we lay a bit of framework that will help you better digest the content of forthcoming articles in this series.
now, let’s dive in!
to say that eve’s bayou is a southern gothic masterpiece would be an understatement. this film is absolutely perfect from start to finish and takes you on a journey through memory, love, family, grief, adultry and death. it’s the directorial debut of kasi lemmons, starring journee smollet, samuel l jackson, lynn whitfield, debbi morgan, megan good and diahann carroll to state a few of the stars of this film. it takes place in the bayous of louisiana during the summer where an affluent creole family who has magic in their bloodline reside. the movie starts at a party within the elite black community. there is joy, love, laughter, resentment, jealousy and even a secret that has yet to be uncovered. it’s so fascinating how quickly the lives of these characters gets flipped upside down and yet and still they persevere until the very end.
our hero of this story is eve batiste, named after her ancestor who lived on the land many years before her. eve is 10 years old with a personality like a livewire. she is the spark that created everything both literally and symbolically. her choices were the catalyst to nearly everything that occurred in this film. she drove the story forward because she needed answers, clarity and peace of mind. the middle child, with an older sister, cicely and a younger brother, ‘po, eve and her siblings cheered to the start of summer. this moment is the three of cups archetype in the tarot.
the three of cups is an emotional card. it is the cups suit which is the water element and traditionally represents celebration, friendship, connection, joyous moments and jovial activities. but it can also hint at overindulgence and getting lost in our vices, such as drug abuse and alcoholism, sex and anything else that could be considered self-destructive yet pleasurable. the three of cups is that fine line between indulging in sensual pleasures like a true hedonist and becoming seduced by the allure of sensuality and these worldly pleasures. it’s very venusian and taurean in the sense that it is what drives us as humans on earth.
we live to feel and touch and be immersed in tangible things. we like the pleasures of life. we want to smell the flowers, lay in them and pick them too. we want to take our time and drink our wine, smoke our weed, have amazing sex, fall in love, create art and do it all over again every single day. but there is a delicate balancing act that must occur in order to truly master the sensual persuasions. one cannot simply avoid them altogether nor get lost in them. those two extremes are detrimental equally and serve no purpose. and eve’s bayou really takes us on that journey of what can happen when you are driven by the lower form of the three of cups. the consequences of choosing to lose yourself in worldly and egoic activities that only stimulate the lower chakras. activities with no heart and soul but things that bring temporary fulfillment yet drain us and leave us with more to fix further down the line.
in the first 5 minutes of the movie, you think that no harm or no foul can be done when observing the behavior of louis batiste, the head of the household and most acclaimed black doctor in all of louisiana. louis is married to the most beautiful woman in the world, yet he doesn’t see or cherish her because his curiosity has been piqued by a seductive venusian woman, by the name of matty morreaux. not realizing that curiosity kills the cat in the end, but we’ll get into that later.
matty’s character archetype exudes taurean bovine energy. and later in the film once the secret has been revealed to cicely, she refers to matty as a “cow”. and cows are the female counterpart of bulls which is tauruses symbol. the worst part about this infidelity is that matty is a married woman herself and she is unsatisfied and seeks pleasure outside of her home. her lust and louis’s curiosity coupled with both of their lack of loyalty are the reason that they were sloppy enough to get caught in the act by eve. the thing is, people were already suspicious and gossiping about louis and matty before they were caught in the act. so that goes to show that this situation was always going to boil over and it wasn’t going to end well.
the party scene and the events shortly after really set the tone and foreshadows a lot of the traumas that will occur later in the film. every scene foreshadows what’s to come but because we are revisiting eve’s memory of what happened the summer that she killed her father, we can’t be so certain that any of it is reality. after all, she lets us know during the first minute of the film that “memory is a selection of images. some elusive and some imprinted indelibly on the brain.” but i’d like to counter that by saying that even the fact that eve believes she is responsible for her father’s death is absurd because like elzora said to roz the day she had her fortuned read was that “sometimes a soldier falls on his own sword.” this is a metaphor for louis being driven by his [redacted] and being the cause of his own death. and as tragic as his death was, it may have been better for everyone in the end.
nothing good comes from living a lie and a life with no loyalty. louis had completely abandoned his family and his household to run the streets because he wanted to be a “hero to a certain kind of woman.” and even though roz desperately needed him, his love and his presence, she was independent enough to never rely on his validation and i think he knew that which is why he seeked that approval and affirmation elsewhere, anywhere he could get it. and unfortunately, it caught up to him and he had to suffer the consequences. the ultimate consequence…. death as a result of one of the seven deadly sins which is lust. eve may have put the wheels in motion by paying a hoodoo priestess to do the dirty work for her but destiny is destiny and depending on how you look at it, it was always going to end the way it did.
which leads us to the next tarot archetype in this film, death. death is the 13th trump card in the major arcana in the tarot and it is typically associated with literal death, figurative death and rebirth, scorpio energy and its archetypal transformation from scorpion to eagle to phoenix. this card is associated with creation and destruction and also shares similar themes with the tower card in the tarot. death typically has a negative connotation and interpretation because many are fearful of the inevitable and that stigma is one of the reasons that many people are weary of and dismiss tarot to this day. between the death and the devil card, you cannot convince most of these people that there is any good to come with interpreting these pictorial symbols and using your intuition to interpret and use them as a tool to navigating your life.
in eve’s bayou, death is nearly an uncredited character. its like a spirit or energy that possesses each of these characters at some point or another making them wish death on one another out of frustration and anger. it all starts at the end of the night around 17 minutes into the film when mozelle and harry are getting ready to leave. harry is clearly drunk and so is louis. they get into a bit of a tussle and mozelle jokingly threatens to kill harry if he doesn’t get in the car so she can safely drive them home. moments later they are in a car accident that tragically ends with harry passing. this is the start of death and its chess game with the batiste family. one could say that mozelle manifested harry’s death by speaking it into existence, however, she also believes that she is a black widow and is cursed. this theme affirms the idea that what we think becomes reality and we can speak things into existence. harry is the third addition to her ancestral altar of dead husbands that died on account of loving her. mozelle’s experience with love was plagued with death and her heart had been broken three times over and over and over again. and over the course of this film she will become more comfortable with the idea of it as she gives herself permission to love freely and fully.
mozelle is a spiritual counselor and people trust her. she is gifted with the power of sight. also known as clairvoyance. this is a generational gift that appears to be passed down through the batiste side of their family. however, i do believe that roz also is intuitive but she would rather not acknowledge the truth because it is so heartbreaking. sometime its better to be wrong about a situation. it can be very draining to have all the answers all the time but mozelle is comfortable with it. she understands the sacrifice that comes with living the lifestyle that she does and on an archetypal level, she is a priestess and typically they are alone. like monks or priests. being a channel for divine information leaves little room for worldly love or romance because you have to commit fully to the mission but we are all seduced by love every now and again and mozelle is no different. all her life she has spent it exploring the worlds of everyone else, getting an understanding of what the signs are telling her and protecting the ones she loves with her intuitive knowing. she could see it all but couldn’t see what was right in front of her in the mirror. she was “blind to her own life.”
one of the most crucial moments in the film is right after roz and mozelle go to the market and get their fortunes read by elzora. elzora is a psychic and hoodooist that mozelle is weary of and what this scene depicts is the batiste family being locked in a reality that they cannot escape. psychics and fortune tellers are people that can interpret the future based on the symbols of the present. but the future isn’t meant to be discovered prematurely. so when people visit a psychic, that psychic is only seeing a sliver of what the future could possibly hold and in that limits the possibilities of the person they are reading.
we live in a world of limitless possibilities, anything can happen but we mustn’t let people predict our futures based on their limited perceptions. think of it like the color and light spectrum. the human eye can see only a smallllllll piece of the full light spectrum but just because we can’t see the rest with our naked eye, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or is not there. so as elzora is predicting and enforcing this future on the batiste family, the fear sets in and it slowly becomes more of a reality. this turbulent experience left mozelle in a frenzy and she was also able to see a possibility of what the future held for their family based on her perception of what elzora had foretold them.
in mozelle’s vision, she saw a child getting hit by a bus, a man walking in the train tracks, and a child being pushed out of the way. her interpretation of this vision was that one of the batiste children was going to get ran over by a bus and she completely ignored the other symbols that were presented in this vision. had she fully taken in what the soul of the world was telling her, maybe she could have played a part in changing the future. but like i said earlier, it was always going to end the way that it did.
throughout the remainder of the film, the idea of murder and death as a threat comes out of the mouths of the batiste family. they all threaten each other with the possibility and every time they utter the word, the reality of it coming to fruition sets in and like the final destination film series shows us, it’s not something you can run from. balance is necessary and the cycle of life and death is completely normal and shouldn’t be feared but embraced because death isn’t the end its just the end of this experience and the beginning of a new one.
the other two symbols in mozelle’s vision come to fruition toward the end of her film when eve rushes to find her father and matty at a bar with hopes of saving him from his fate. she only does this after she realized that there was no turning back. she planted the seed of death in the air when she told cicely that she was going to kill him for hurting her and she planted the seed in mr. morreaux’s ear when she saw him at the market while she was looking to commission elzora to make her a voodoo doll of her father. she sealed the deal twice in that moment and whether or not you can kill a person with voodoo is beside the point but it just goes to show how powerful we truly are when it comes to speaking our existences into reality.
in closing, eve’s bayou at its core is a film about loyalty and protection. eve’s intentions were to protect her family and her mother from the aftermath and destruction that her father’s behavior would ultimately bring. she inherited the gift of site and could see things beyond explanation. her choices were justified and so were her fathers. we all have free-will and we all play a part in fulfilling the destiny we write from the choices we make. our worlds intertwine and our decisions affect one another indirectly and directly and as life goes on, we’ll remember the moments in time that led us to where we are now. make choices that you can live with. make choices that you are proud of. make choices that are for the greater good of yourself, your community, and the world around you.
i hope you enjoyed reading this and be on the lookout for the next one!