Six of Cups
The six of cups in the tarot's Minor Arcana: children in an old garden, their cups filled with flowers. A. E. Waite read it as the past, memories and childhood.
Meaning
Waite describes the card: "Children in an old garden, their cups filled with flowers."
What does the Six of Cups mean?
Waite's meanings are "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"; reversed, "the future, renewal, that which will come to pass presently". His list of additional meanings adds "pleasant memories", and reversed, "inheritance to fall in quickly".
In older decks
In Italian packs the suit is coppe, cups: the earliest suit marks, the British Museum's catalogue of 1876 records, were coppe, danari, bastoni and spade, "cups, money, clubs, and swords". Papus reads it as "love destroyed in the midst of happiness; widowhood".
See also
The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant.
Sources
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A. E. Waite, William Rider & Son, London, 1910 (the sacred-texts.com transcription, on the Internet Archive), The Lesser Arcana; Some Additional Meanings of the Lesser Arcana
- The Tarot of the Bohemians, by Papus, Chapman & Hall, London, 1896, translated by A. P. Morton (scan on the Internet Archive), The Divining Tarot, second lesson: the minor arcana
- A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and Other Cards in the British Museum, by W. H. Willshire, Trustees of the British Museum, London, 1876 (scan on the Internet Archive), General history: the marks of the suits
Last reviewed September 28, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research