MINOR ARCANA · CUPS · WATER
Nine of Cups
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Material Happiness
UPRIGHT
Contentment, wishes fulfilled.
REVERSED
Smugness, dissatisfaction, materialism.
The card
The Nine of Cups is the ninth card of Cups, the suit of Water: emotion, love and intuition.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Material Happiness and gave it Jupiter in Pisces, the decan of 10°–20° Pisces, which the Sun passes through each year from about 28 February to 10 March.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Nine 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 goodly personage has feasted to his heart's content, and abundant refreshment of wine is on the arched counter behind him, seeming to indicate that the future is also assured. The picture offers the material side only, but there are other aspects. DIVINATORY MEANINGS Concord, contentment, physical bien-être; also victory, success, advantage; satisfaction for the Querent or person for whom the consultation is made. REVERSED Truth, loyalty, liberty; but the readings vary and include mistakes, imperfections, etc.
FURTHER MEANINGS Of good augury for military men. REVERSED Good business.
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
Wheel of Fortune: its planet, Jupiter · The Moon: its sign, Pisces
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: Nine 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.