MINOR ARCANA · CUPS · WATER
King of Cups
Tarot card meaning
UPRIGHT
Emotional balance, diplomacy, calm under pressure.
REVERSED
Emotional manipulation, moodiness, coldness.
The card
The King of Cups is one of the four court cards of Cups, the suit of Water: emotion, love and intuition.
In the Golden Dawn's scheme each court card is an element within its suit's element: the King of Cups is Fire of Water.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: The Knight of Cups. Crowley's courts are Knight, Queen, Prince and Princess, so this is the card the Rider–Waite–Smith deck calls the King.
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:
He holds a short sceptre in his left hand and a great cup in his right; his throne is set upon the sea; on one side a ship is riding and on the other a dolphin is leaping. The implicit is that the Sign of the Cup naturally refers to water, which appears in all the court cards. DIVINATORY MEANINGS Fair man, man of business, law, or divinity; responsible, disposed to oblige the Querent; also equity, art and science, including those who profess science, law and art; creative intelligence. REVERSED Dishonest, double-dealing man; roguery, exaction, injustice, vice, scandal, pillage, considerable loss.
FURTHER MEANINGS Beware of ill-will on the part of a man of position, and of hypocrisy pretending to help. REVERSED Loss.
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: Roi (the king) of Coupes (cups).
Learn more in the lessons
- Reading the Court Cards · 16 min
- The Tarot & the Stars — Decans, Pips & Courts · 16 min
- The Structure of the Tarot · 14 min · free
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.