MINOR ARCANA · CUPS · WATER
Five of Cups
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Loss in Pleasure
UPRIGHT
Loss, regret, focusing on what was spilled.
REVERSED
Acceptance, moving on, finding what remains.
The card
The Five of Cups is the fifth card of Cups, the suit of Water: emotion, love and intuition.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Loss in Pleasure and gave it Mars in Scorpio, the decan of 0°–10° Scorpio, which the Sun passes through each year from about 23 October to 2 November.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Five 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:
A dark, cloaked figure, looking sideways at three prone cups; two others stand upright behind him; a bridge is in the background, leading to a small keep or holding. DIVINATORY MEANINGS It is a card of loss, but something remains over; three have been taken, but two are left; it is a card of inheritance, patrimony, transmission, but not corresponding to expectations; with some interpreters it is a card of marriage, but not without bitterness or frustration. REVERSED News, alliances, affinity, consanguinity, ancestry, return, false projects.
FURTHER MEANINGS Generally favourable; a happy marriage; also patrimony, legacies, gifts, success in enterprise. REVERSED Return of some relative who has not been seen for long.
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: Five 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.