Cups · minor arcana
Six 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
Children in an old garden, their cups filled with flowers.
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
- A card of the past and of memories, looking back, as—for example—on childhood; happiness, enjoyment, but coming rather from the past; things that have vanished. Another reading reverses this, giving new relations, new knowledge, new environment, and then the children are disporting in an unfamiliar precinct.
- Reversed
- The future, renewal, that which will come to pass presently.
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.
