MINOR ARCANA · CUPS · WATER
Six of Cups
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Pleasure
UPRIGHT
Nostalgia, childhood memories, innocence.
REVERSED
Stuck in the past, unrealistic memories, leaving home.
The card
The Six of Cups is the sixth card of Cups, the suit of Water: emotion, love and intuition.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Pleasure and gave it Sun in Scorpio, the decan of 10°–20° Scorpio, which the Sun passes through each year from about 2 to 12 November.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Six 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:
Children in an old garden, their cups filled with flowers. DIVINATORY MEANINGS A card of the past and of memories, looking back, as—for example—on childhood; happiness, enjoyment, but coming rather from the past; things that have vanished. Another reading reverses this, giving new relations, new knowledge, new environment, and then the children are disporting in an unfamiliar precinct. REVERSED The future, renewal, that which will come to pass presently.
FURTHER MEANINGS Pleasant memories. REVERSED Inheritance to fall in quickly.
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: Six 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.