Nine of Cups
Tarot card meaning, upright and reversed
What it means
Upright
This card is read as contentment and satisfaction, and has long been called the wish card. Waite tied it to physical well-being and plenty.
Reversed
Reversed, it is read as smugness, overindulgence, or a wish granted that turns out to feel empty.
A question to sit with
What are you genuinely satisfied with right now? If you made a wish today, what would it be, and what does that tell you?
The deeper reading
Traditionally the heart at ease with what it has.
What is drawn on the card
A well-fed man sits on a bench with his arms folded and a pleased expression. Behind him nine cups stand in a curved row on a table draped in blue cloth.
As Pamela Colman Smith drew it in 1909. Our paintings follow these scenes.
Waite’s own description (1911, paraphrased): A goodly personage who has feasted to his heart's content; abundant refreshment of wine stands on the arched counter behind him, as if the future too were assured.
- 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
Nine 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.