Five of Cups
Tarot card meaning, upright and reversed
What it means
Upright
This card is read as grief over what has been lost, with attention fixed on the spilled cups. Readers point out that two cups still stand, waiting to be noticed.
Reversed
Reversed, it is read as acceptance, moving through grief, and turning back toward what remains.
A question to sit with
What are you still mourning that has already let you go? What two things are still standing behind you?
The deeper reading
Traditionally a card of mourning. Readers take it as the honest work of sorrow, and the slow turn toward what is left.
What is drawn on the card
A figure in a black cloak bows over three spilled cups while two cups stand upright behind. Across a river, a bridge leads to a house or small castle.
As Pamela Colman Smith drew it in 1909. Our paintings follow these scenes.
Waite’s own description (1911, paraphrased): A dark, cloaked figure looks sideways at three prone cups; two others stand upright behind him; a bridge in the background leads to a small keep.
- Suit
- Cups
- Element
- Water
- Domain
- Emotions, relationships, intuition
Where the card comes from
- Tarot began as a card game in 15th-century Italy. The earliest record is from Florence in 1440, and the game is still played today in France, Austria and Bologna.
- Reading the cards for fortunes is documented from Bologna around 1750, with ordinary playing decks.
- In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin wrote that the cards came from ancient Egypt. There is no evidence for it, and he wrote before anyone could read hieroglyphs (1822).
- The Hebrew letters and astrological signs on each card are 19th-century French and English occult attributions; the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1888) fixed the set most readers use.
- The scenes follow the 1909 Waite–Smith deck, designed by A. E. Waite and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith. The Innerverse cards are our own paintings of those scenes.
Sources: Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (1980); Morgan Library & Museum, Visconti-Sforza tarot, MS M.630; Court de Gébelin, Le Monde primitif, vol. VIII (Paris, 1781); A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911).
Draw your own card
Five of Cups is one of 78. Draw one card or a three-card spread in the Innerverse, read with the same art and the same sources, free.
Or make it daily: one card each morning, with a private note →Want the whole deck? All 78 cards and the guidebook.
Traditional readings, presented as tarot readers have held them. They are a record of a practice, not a prediction.