Cups · minor arcana
Three 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
Maidens in a garden-ground with cups uplifted, as if pledging one another.
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
- The conclusion of any matter in plenty, perfection and merriment; happy issue, victory, fulfilment, solace, healing.
- Reversed
- Expedition, dispatch, achievement, end. It signifies also the side of excess in physical enjoyment, and the pleasures of the senses.
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.
