MINOR ARCANA · CUPS · WATER
Page of Cups
Tarot card meaning
UPRIGHT
A creative or emotional message, intuition.
REVERSED
Emotional immaturity, creative block, escapism.
The card
The Page 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 Page of Cups is Earth of Water.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: The Princess of Cups. Crowley's courts are Knight, Queen, Prince and Princess, so this is the card the Rider–Waite–Smith deck calls the Page.
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 fair, pleasing, somewhat effeminate page, of studious and intent aspect, contemplates a fish rising from a cup to look at him. It is the pictures of the mind taking form. DIVINATORY MEANINGS Fair young man, one impelled to render service and with whom the Querent will be connected; a studious youth; news, message; application, reflection, meditation; also these things directed to business. REVERSED Taste, inclination, attachment, seduction, deception, artifice.
FURTHER MEANINGS Good augury; also a young man who is unfortunate in love. REVERSED Obstacles of all kinds.
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: Valet (the knave) 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.