MINOR ARCANA · CUPS · WATER
Ace of Cups
Tarot card meaning
UPRIGHT
New love, emotional opening, compassion overflowing.
REVERSED
Emotional blockage, repressed feelings, emptiness.
The card
The Ace of Cups is the first card of Cups, the suit of Water: emotion, love and intuition.
As the ace it is the root of its element: the Golden Dawn called it the Root of the Powers of Water.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Ace of Cups, with the title and the zodiac decan from the Golden Dawn, as shown above.
In Waite's words
Arthur Edward Waite designed the deck that Pamela Colman Smith drew, and explained it in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911). His text, with his spelling:
The waters are beneath, and thereon are water-lilies; the hand issues from the cloud, holding in its palm the cup, from which four streams are pouring; a dove, bearing in its bill a cross-marked Host, descends to place the Wafer in the Cup; the dew of water is falling on all sides. It is an intimation of that which may lie behind the Lesser Arcana DIVINATORY MEANINGS House of the true heart, joy, content, abode, nourishment, abundance, fertility; Holy Table, felicity hereof. REVERSED House of the false heart, mutation, instability, revolution.
FURTHER MEANINGS Inflexible will, unalterable law. REVERSED Unexpected change of position.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London: William Rider & Son, 1911), Part III §§ 2 and 4. Public domain; text from the 1922 printing on Wikisource.
Related cards
The same card in the other suits
In three historical decks
The same card as it was painted in fifteenth-century Milan, printed in the French pattern of the Tarot de Marseille, and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for the Rider–Waite–Smith deck.
In the Tarot de Marseille: Ace of Coupes (cups). The numbered cards carry no scene, only the suit's symbols arranged as on a playing card, so they are read from the number and the pattern.
Learn more in the lessons
- The Structure of the Tarot · 14 min · free
- The Tarot & the Stars — Decans, Pips & Courts · 16 min
- Reading the Cards · 16 min
Images: Pamela Colman Smith, 1909 (public domain); the RWS1909 scans on Wikimedia Commons. Lequart, Paris, c. 1890 (public domain); scans from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica), via Wikimedia Commons. Attributed to Bonifacio Bembo, mid-15th century (public domain); scans by David Madore, via Wikimedia Commons.