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
In Waite's words: "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, giving new relations, new knowledge, new environment, and then the children are disporting in an unfamiliar precinct"; 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
Italian packs call the suit coppe, cups; the British Museum's catalogue of 1876 lists it among the suit marks of the earliest cards. Papus reads it as "Love destroyed in the midst of happiness. Widowhood."
Read next
- Next in Tarot cardsSeven of CupsThe seven of cups in the tarot's Minor Arcana: strange cups of vision, filled with fantastic images. A. E. Waite read it as imagination and fancies with nothing lasting behind them.
- The same shape in Chinese radicalsNǚ 女The character for ‘woman’ and ‘girl’, and radical 38 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters to do with women are filed.
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
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves, letters and numbers or squares and rectangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 30, 2026. How we research
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