MINOR ARCANA · CUPS · WATER
Four of Cups
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Blended Pleasure
UPRIGHT
Apathy, contemplation, overlooking an offer.
REVERSED
Renewed interest, seizing opportunities, withdrawal ending.
The card
The Four of Cups is the fourth card of Cups, the suit of Water: emotion, love and intuition.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Blended Pleasure and gave it Moon in Cancer, the decan of 20°–30° Cancer, which the Sun passes through each year from about 12 to 22 July.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Four 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 young man is seated under a tree and contemplates three cups set on the grass before him; an arm issuing from a cloud offers him another cup. His expression notwithstanding is one of discontent with his environment. DIVINATORY MEANINGS Weariness, disgust, aversion, imaginary vexations, as if the wine of this world had caused satiety only; another wine, as if a fairy gift, is now offered the wastrel, but he sees no consolation therein. This is also a card of blended pleasure. REVERSED Novelty, presage, new instruction, new relations.
FURTHER MEANINGS Contrarieties. REVERSED Presentiment.
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
Its trumps
The High Priestess: its planet, Moon · The Chariot: its sign, Cancer
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: Four 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 Tarot & the Stars — Decans, Pips & Courts · 16 min
- The Structure of the Tarot · 14 min · free
- 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.