Cups · minor arcana
Ace of Cups
One of the fourteen cups. Drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for the deck first published in London in December 1909.
What is drawn on it
The waters are beneath, and thereon are water-lilies; the hand issues from the cloud, holding in its palm the cup, from which four streams are pouring; a dove, bearing in its bill a cross-marked Host, descends to place the Wafer in the Cup; the dew of water is falling on all sides. It is an intimation of that which may lie behind the Lesser Arcana
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, 1911, Part III, § 2, where the meanings below follow it in the same paragraph.
The last sentence has no full stop in the 1911 printing: 'the Lesser Arcana' runs straight on into 'Divinatory Meanings'. It is left as printed.
What Waite says it means
These are the divinatory meanings printed in 1911, quoted as he wrote them. They are reported here as what one named book says, not as a claim that a card means anything or predicts anything.
- Upright
- House of the true heart, joy, content, abode, nourishment, abundance, fertility; Holy Table, felicity hereof.
- Reversed
- House of the false heart, mutation, instability, revolution.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, London, 1911, Part III, § 2. Out of copyright.
Its suit
Cups is one of the four suits of the minor arcana. The Golden Dawn attributed it to water, and in the tradition Waite worked in it is taken to cover feeling, attachment and what a person values. Its counterpart in an ordinary playing-card pack is hearts: the two packs share an ancestor, rather than one descending from the other.
The cups
Read on
Card face: Pamela Colman Smith, from the first printing published by William Rider & Son. Public domain. Source file. Full list on the credits page.
