Cups · minor arcana
Seven 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
Strange chalices of vision, but the images are more especially those of the fantastic spirit.
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
- Fairy favours, images of reflection, sentiment, imagination, things seen in the glass of contemplation; some attainment in these degrees, but nothing permanent or substantial is suggested.
- Reversed
- Desire, will, determination, project.
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.
