MINOR ARCANA · CUPS · WATER
Three of Cups
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Abundance
UPRIGHT
Friendship, celebration, community.
REVERSED
Overindulgence, gossip, isolation from friends.
The card
The Three of Cups is the third card of Cups, the suit of Water: emotion, love and intuition.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Abundance and gave it Mercury in Cancer, the decan of 10°–20° Cancer, which the Sun passes through each year from about 1 to 12 July.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Three 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:
Maidens in a garden-ground with cups uplifted, as if pledging one another. DIVINATORY MEANINGS The conclusion of any matter in plenty, perfection and merriment; happy issue, victory, fulfilment, solace, healing. REVERSED Expedition, dispatch, achievement, end. It signifies also the side of excess in physical enjoyment, and the pleasures of the senses.
FURTHER MEANINGS Unexpected advancement for military man. REVERSED Consolation, cure, end of the 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
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: Three 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.