Six of Cups
Tarot card meaning, upright and reversed
What it means
Upright
This card is read as memory and simple kindness: childhood, old friends, and gifts given without calculation. Waite tied it to the past and to things that have vanished.
Reversed
Reversed, it is read as being stuck in the past, or as finally stepping out of it toward the future.
A question to sit with
What memory has been on your mind lately? Is there an old friend, a place, or a simple pleasure worth returning to?
The deeper reading
Readers see here the innocent heart, and the question of what the past still has to teach.
What is drawn on the card
In an old courtyard, a boy offers a girl a cup filled with white flowers. Six cups of flowers stand around them, and a guard walks away in the background.
As Pamela Colman Smith drew it in 1909. Our paintings follow these scenes.
Waite’s own description (1911, paraphrased): Children in an old garden, their cups filled with flowers.
- 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
Six 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.