← Encyclopedia of Tarot · lesson 80/121
Cups
Cups are the suit of Water. Their cards are about feeling: love and friendship, joy and disappointment, longing, memory, imagination and intuition. A cup holds what is poured into it, and this suit describes what a person holds in their heart, what fills them and what leaves them empty.
Element and character
Water is receptive, fluid and deep, and the Cups share its gifts and its risks. At their best they show tenderness, empathy, generosity, creativity and the capacity to be moved; at their worst, moodiness, daydreaming, self-indulgence and feelings that drift without direction. Many Rider–Waite–Smith Cups are set near rivers, pools or the sea.
Areas of life
Cups tend to speak about relationships of every kind — romance, family, friendship, community — and about pleasure, celebration and hospitality. They also cover the inner world: dreams, the imagination, spiritual feeling and the emotional side of any situation, including work.
In playing cards
The Cups correspond to the suit of hearts. Older packs show them as goblets or chalices, and some decks call them Chalices.
The Golden Dawn signs
The Golden Dawn gave the numbered cards Two to Ten to the decans of the three Water signs: the Twos to Fours to Cancer, the Fives to Sevens to Scorpio, and the Eights to Tens to Pisces. So the Two of Cups is Venus in the first decan of Cancer, and the Ten of Cups is Mars in the last decan of Pisces. These are the Golden Dawn's attributions, which most English-language decks follow.
The Ace as root
The Ace of Cups is the root of the suit: feeling at its source, a heart opening, love or joy offered before it has found its object. The other numbered cards follow that feeling through meeting, celebration, boredom, loss, memory, choice, departure and fulfilment. The courts, from the Page to the King, show people or attitudes in whom feeling leads.
When Cups dominate a spread
When many Cups appear together, the reading is usually about the heart: relationships, emotional needs, what brings happiness and what is missed. The Golden Dawn's rule for a majority of Cups was "pleasure and merriment", and a spread full of Cups often has warmth in it. A reader may also ask whether feeling is being matched by action, since a reading made only of Water can lack a plan.
In astrology
The Golden Dawn's correspondences, which most English-language decks follow (French, Marseille-based tradition differs for some Major Arcana).
Element: Water — the element of Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces
Numbered cards, sign by sign:
- Cancer (cardinal): Two of Cups, Three of Cups, Four of Cups
- Scorpio (fixed): Five of Cups, Six of Cups, Seven of Cups
- Pisces (mutable): Eight of Cups, Nine of Cups, Ten of Cups
Twos to Fours hold the cardinal signs, Fives to Sevens the fixed, Eights to Tens the mutable.