Cups · minor arcana
Four 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
A young man is seated under a tree and contemplates three cups set on the grass before him; an arm issuing from a cloud offers him another cup. His expression notwithstanding is one of discontent with his environment.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, 1911, Part III, § 2, where the meanings below follow it in the same paragraph.
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
- Weariness, disgust, aversion, imaginary vexations, as if the wine of this world had caused satiety only; another wine, as if a fairy gift, is now offered the wastrel, but he sees no consolation therein. This is also a card of blended pleasure.
- Reversed
- Novelty, presage, new instruction, new relations.
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.
