Discovering the suits: The Cups in tarot

Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc

By Sarah Taylor

With the Cups in tarot, we meet with the second level of manifestation — how we are choosing to create and experience our world in every moment.

Ace of Cups - RWS Tarot deck.
Ace of Cups from the Rider-Waite Smith Tarot deck. Cups are the suit associated with our emotional natures. Click on the image for a larger version.

As I point out frequently in this column, life doesn’t simply happen to us. Or, at least, that’s not how I have come to see our time here on this planet. In every moment, we are Magicians, whether we know it or not, whether we work actively with the concept or not. We are creating life, with our energy (Wands), our feelings (Cups), our thoughts (Swords) and our actions (Pentacles).

In The Magician card, second card of the major arcana, the magus stands behind his work table, all four suits there in front of him to employ in his act of self- and world-definition: They are the ingredients for the experience he is in the process of creating. The Magician is a powerful card — yet it appears at the beginning of the major arcana: which means it is an archetype that is available to us from the start. That, I feel, says something worth bearing in mind; from the outset we have the tools and means to create magic. It might take a few journeys through the major arcana to understand and accept this. But that is what we are: We are wizards. (A book I highly recommend, which explains things to this effect is The Way of the Wizard by Deepak Chopra.)

As the second suit in the minor arcana, Cups harness the neutral energy of the Wands and run with it in a particular direction. This direction is dependent on the quality of the emotion we are experiencing. Cups, as emotions, influence our thoughts, Swords, which in turn influence how the world appears to us — and how we appear to the world. This is not woo-woo stuff — although it’s often seen and explained in particularly woo-woo, New Agey terms, which has the effect of its seeming relevant only to those people who have watched The Secret or read the Abraham-Hicks books. But really, it is an entirely practical experience. It comes down to this, at its simplest: If you are feeling crappy, it is hard not to see that in the world around you. If you are feeling joy, that is what you will tend to choose to see above everything else. Thus, you have started to shape your reality.

Here are the fourteen Cups cards and what they encapsulate:

Ace of Cups – This is what I would term agape love: Love in its purest form, a love that has no conditions placed upon it, the love that the creator feels for what it has created. How this love is translated into our manifested life depends on how we choose to work with it — and the different ways that we do are depicted in the rest of the Cups suit. However, the foundation of each card is always the Ace: It is what is available to us if we are willing and able to recover it.

Two of Cups – The Two is romantic love. It is love discovered in, and reflected back from, the Other. It is the point where we realise that there is an ‘other‘ — when, as babes in arms, we discover ourselves to be separate beings, which then kicks us off on a journey to find that sense of unity again by searching for it in someone else. Ultimately that search is futile, but what a feeling nonetheless!

Three of Cups – While the saying goes that ‘Two’s company and three’s a crowd’, here three is community, a harmonious meeting that is nurturing and joyful. Unlike the Three of Swords, which connotes conflict of some kind, the three here is more like a three-legged stool, connoting collaboration and the sense of stability that can emanate from that.

Four of Cups – Some see this as meditation. I see it more often as disillusionment and ennui, with a failure to see the reality of the situation. The figure has all that he needs — shelter, sustenance, fair weather and the offer of love that comes unconditionally, as a gift — and yet he chooses to cross his arms, closing himself off and staring down at the three empty cups in front of him. This is a call to effect a shift in perspective above all else.

Five of Cups – Another figure fixated on a facet of his experience rather than the true picture: Here, however, he is looking at three cups, their contents spilled on the ground, his hunched shoulders and black clothing indicative of sorrow and loss. What he isn’t seeing, however, are the two cups behind him. Like guides, they stand unknown to him. It is up to him to acknowledge the possibility of their presence. If he turns around, he is opening himself not only to their existence, but also to the energy of the Two of Cups.

Six of Cups – I’ve heard this described as the “soul mate” card; this rings true for me. There is a rapport between the two figures that transcends their seeming incongruities: The child is bigger than the adult, which to me is the inversion of ages based on past incarnations. The larger figure may seem chronologically younger, but there is a seniority in him that belies his years. And there is tenderness — so much so that it puts conflict in the shade: The armed figure in the background is picked out in grey and walking into the distance, a shadowy memory. I know that the Ten of Cups is the card of outward joy, but this one has grown on me as a card that depicts esteem and familiarity.

Seven of Cups – Choices, choices, choices. None of them is the ‘wrong’ choice because all of them rest on the cloud of the divine: They are all heaven-sent. However, they will offer different experiences. Some seem more obvious than others — but is that the reality of them, or simply our judgements coming into play? Two things are of specific interest to me: the skull on the cup containing the laurel wreath, and the shrouded figure. What do they mean? Perhaps there is no set answer. Perhaps the choice extends to choosing their personal symbolism to you, the shadowed figure in the foreground.

Eight of Cups – I view this as the ‘break-up card’. It features often in my readings when a relationship is ending, but it can also mean the ending of anything in which we have an emotional investment, including a part of ourselves that we are being called to walk away from. But there is support: The cups left behind are lined up — all is in place. And, while the figure is walking away from them, he is also actively walking towards something else, which might present itself once the eclipse has passed — which itself is potent, but also temporary. I have tended in the past to see only the loss in this card. Today, I also see the potential for something new.

Nine of Cups – Love for show. Love on display. Cups lined up, neatly, placed there by human hands, on a man-made cloth draped over what I imagine to be trestle tables — again, man-made. The cups are genuine, but they are supported by a fabrication — our illusion that we can control everything about our feelings, and others’. When we surrender to our emotions and allow them to shape us, that is when the magic happens.

Ten of Cups – On the surface, this is the card of ‘happy families’ — and that might well be a reflection of what is going in the querent’s life. However, the Ten of Cups is where love finds its true home: in the marriage of the self. When we have united inner masculine and feminine, our adult with the inner child, that is when we can create a place of enduring security and the potential for an opening to love from others. In other words, a fulfilling relationship with another is predicated on a fulfilling relationship with oneself, and not the other way around. What was started in the Two has deepened and expanded in the Ten.

Page of Cups – To me, the Page represents innocent wonder: our willingness to open ourselves to the unknown, and, in the context of Cups, to be open to an adventure of the heart in a spirit of child-like curiosity and acceptance. The presence of the fish in the Page’s cup has associations with Christianity, which tells me that this encounter with love is as much about our Earthly emotions as it is about our link with spirit. The Page is the first human incarnation of our step towards the integration of the mundane with the spiritual, where Earthly and divine love can no longer be seen as wholly separate.

Knight of Cups – Love is ‘out there’. That’s the message of the Knight. Love is a quest, a land to be conquered, and it is best to go there prepared to fight for it and to protect yourself from the attacks that will come because of it. There is idealism, for sure. There is also a sense that there will be contenders for the same objective. The Knight has not yet learned that the Holy Grail is available to everyone, its gift of love infinite.

Queen of Cups – Unlike the Page and the Knight, the Queen is so closely associated with her suit that she has become ‘of the water’: her toe dips into the sea lapping at her feet, her robe is an extension of its waves. Unlike the preceding cards, the cup she holds is ornate. It feels like a combination of careful human craftsmanship as well as symbolising the divine: Heaven and Earth meet in what she holds. The Queen is the emotional feminine. She is a vessel, receptive, yin to the King’s yang. Together they embody the balance of opposites, from which extends our creative potential.

King of Cups – I love the King of Cups. Compared with the Queen, he is more colourful, more physically present. The Queen is ethereal, the King is corporeal. Therein lies that balance. What strikes me is that the King is actually in the sea, but is supported by a concrete platform: He carries his sense of foundation with him. His cup is simple, but he holds a sceptre in his left — a phallic complement to the Queen’s elaborate container.

The further we travel down the road to manifesting something in the physical world, the slower the process. Wands energy is zingy and takes some learning and discipline to harness and direct. Cups, as emotions, are slightly easier to identify and hold on to but they, too, are mutable: They are subject to change, and this has its advantages as well as its disadvantages. The primary disadvantage is that if we don’t have a handle on our emotions, our creative process can have unpredictable results, subject to the whims of our psyches.

I don’t think it is coincidental that, in many forms of psychotherapy, our emotions are of central importance to the therapeutic work. How we are feeling, and what we are denying in terms of our feelings, have a striking impact on our lives. Emotions repressed, denied, projected, split — all of the things that we do so as not to feel our feelings — keep us from being whole, integrated beings. And if we are not whole, then how can our lives be whole?

Which is where the advantage of the mutability of emotions comes in: We have time, and opportunity, to change them — over years, or in an instant. We can remove the blocks that we have put between us and our feelings, and when we do that, I firmly believe that life starts to flow in ways that we could not have imagined before. When life flows, our experience of it changes. When that happens, we can say with conviction that life has, indeed, changed for us. That is the art of creation in action.

2 thoughts on “Discovering the suits: The Cups in tarot”

  1. Wow, Sarah, this post is amazingly clear and direct about a very slippery subject. Thank you, again, for sharing so simply a very important subject to me as a human being. The movement of the Tarot from one “stage” (?) to the next does connect us as human beings–it seems I am so different when I am “feeling my feelings” or thrashing around in denial, but really, as the number of cards indicates, there is a finite number of ways that this inward landscape can be worked with and felt and it is common to us all.

    Your perspective and wisdom comes out in these posts, and, the light begins to shine, the clouds begin to break, the ideas dawn, maybe there is something different , another way, a separate approach perhaps. Or, more commonly for me when there is clarity like this, OH! so That is what was/is going on!

    Thank you as always. Couldn’t get to this article before now. I appreciate your input here on PW so much.

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