MINOR ARCANA · CUPS · WATER
Knight of Cups
Tarot card meaning
UPRIGHT
Romance, charm, following the heart.
REVERSED
Moodiness, unrealistic romance, jealousy.
The card
The Knight 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 Knight of Cups is Air of Water.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: The Prince of Cups. Crowley's courts are Knight, Queen, Prince and Princess, so this is the card the Rider–Waite–Smith deck calls the Knight.
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:
Graceful, but not warlike; riding quietly, wearing a winged helmet, referring to those higher graces of the imagination which sometimes characterize this card. He too is a dreamer, but the images of the side of sense haunt him in his vision. DIVINATORY MEANINGS Arrival, approach—sometimes that of a messenger; advances, proposition, demeanour, invitation, incitement. REVERSED Trickery, artifice, subtlety, swindling, duplicity, fraud.
FURTHER MEANINGS A visit from a friend, who will bring unexpected money to the Querent. REVERSED Irregularity.
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: Cavalier (the knight) 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.