How To Read Each Tarot Card In The Suit Of Cups Minor Arcana Deck
It’s time for tarot!
Toa Heftiba via @unsplash The Ace of Cups is a good tarot card to get. The entire Suit of Cups is all emotion and creativity. However, I’m the kind of person that needs to thoroughly understand something before I start doing it myself.
Take the Minor tarot for example. I need to know what every card means, what each Arcana card represents, and how it’s placement in a spread affects the meaning. So, to save you some time, I did the work for you.
Here’s a tarot card guide with meanings to the Suit of Cups Minor Arcana, from Ace of Cups to the King of Cups.
The Suit of Cups is associated with your emotional level of consciousness. It’s associated with water, which means it can be soft and gentle, or powerful and raging.
If it comes up in a spread, it means you’re thinking more with your heart than with your head. Since it’s related to water, the Suit of Cups is heavily associated with the water signs in astrology: Pisces, Scorpio, and Cancer. It’s also associated with romance, creativity, and personal matters.
Now that you know a little bit about the Cup's Suit overall, let’s take a deep dive into the tarot cards themselves.
Tarot card meaning of the Ace of Cups
This tarot card shows a hand holding a cup overflowing with streams of water, representing your mind and the abundance of emotion and creativity you have. A dove flies above the cup, and below is a vast sea with lotus blossoms.
The dove represents love flowing up to your consciousness. The sea represents the awakening of your human spirit. If the Ace of Cups is upright in your spread, it represents love, new relationships, compassion, and creativity. If it’s reversed, it represents self-love, intuition, and repressed emotions.
Tarot card meaning of the Two of Cups
This tarot card shows a man and a woman exchanging cups, as if in the middle of a wedding ceremony. The Caduceus of Hermes floats overhead, representing an exchange or trade.
Above it is a lion’s head, representing the sexual energy between the couple. When the Two of Cups is upright, it represents a unified love, partnership, and mutual attraction. When this card is reversed, it represents self-love, break-ups, disharmony, and distrust.
Tarot card meaning of the Three of Cups
This cup shows three women dancing together, raising their cups in love, respect, and friendship. They support each other and their unique qualities. The flowers and fruits on the ground represent a good harvest, but also the good quality of life they have.
When the Three of Cups is upright, it represents celebration, friendship, creativity, and collaborations. When it’s reversed, it represents independence, needing alone time, hardcore partying, and the idea that ‘three’s a crowd’.
Tarot card meaning of the Four of Cups
This tarot card shows a man meditating under a tree. He doesn’t notice that someone is offering him a cup and that there are three others at his feet. He is so focused on his own thoughts he refuses to see the new opportunities that lay before him.
When Four of Cups is upright, it represents meditation, contemplation, apathy, and reevaluation. When it’s reversed, it represents retreat, withdrawal, and checking in for an alignment.
Tarot card meaning of the Five of Cups
This tarot card shows a man focusing intently on three cups that are knocked over. These are failures and regrets. Behind him are two upright cups, and behind that is a bridge crossing over a river.
The cups represent new opportunities that he refuses to see, and the bridge represents his need to get over his failures. When Five of Cups is upright, it represents regret, failure, disappointment, and pessimism. When reversed, it represents personal setbacks, self-forgiveness, and moving on.
Tarot card meaning of the Six of Cups
The Six of Cups shows a young boy handing a young girl a cup full of flowers. The other 5 cups are scattered throughout the card. In the background, there is an older man walking away. Six of Cups represents love, harmony, and cooperation.
The little girl loves and respects the boy giving her flowers, and they’re happy in their childhood. They don’t have to worry about adult things.
When this tarot card is upright, it represents revisiting the past, childhood memories, innocence, and joy. When the card is reversed living in the past, forgiveness, and lacking playfulness.
Tarot card meaning of the Seven of Cups
This tarot card shows a man filling up the seven cups with different gifts. Some of these gifts are good, like jewels and money. Others are curses, like snakes and dragons. It represents being careful what you wish for, and that not everything is as it seems.
When the Seven of Cups is upright, it represents opportunities, choices, wishful thinking, and illusions. When it’s reversed, it represents alignment, personal values, and feeling overwhelmed by choices.
Tarot card meaning of the Eight of Cups
A man walks away from eight cups in this tarot card. The cups are arranged to look like one is missing, representing a feeling of missing something important. The man is walking up the mountain in the dark, knowing that there will be challenges ahead.
He is disappointed, however, that he just wants to escape his failures. When the Eight of Cups tarot card is upright, it represents disappointment, abandonment, withdrawal, and escapism. When it’s reversed, it represents trying one more time, indecision, aimless drifting, and walking away.
Tarot card meaning of the Nine of Cups
This tarot card shows a man sitting on a wooden bench. He looks content, and there is an arch of golden cups above his head, representing his fulfillment in his endeavors.
When the Nine of Cups is upright, it represents contentment, satisfaction, gratitude, and a wish come true. When it’s reversed, it represents inner happiness, materialism, dissatisfaction, and indulgence.
Tarot card meaning of the Ten of Cups
This tarot card shows a couple embracing each other while their children play in the background. You can see their house and land in the background, and a rainbow of ten golden cups in the sky.
When the Ten of Cups is upright, it represents divine love, blissful relationships, harmony, and alignment. When it’s reversed, it represents disconnection, misaligned values, and struggling relationships.
Tarot card meaning of the Page of Cups
This tarot card shows a man in a long tunic, wearing a beret, and holding a cup with a fish looking at him. The fish is unexpected, and it represents the creativity and flow of water, as well as the notion that some ideas come about from unlikely places.
When Page of Cups is upright, it represents creative opportunities, intuitive messages, curiosity, and possibility. When it’s reversed, it represents new ideas, doubting intuition, creative blocks, and emotional immaturity.
Tarot card meaning of the Knight of Cups
This knight is different from the swords and wands. This knight is riding a white horse calmly and slowly. He holds out a cup, bearing a message from the heart. The knight represents an active imagination.
The slow horse represents the natural flow of ideas, and the barren landscape represents the thought that ideas can spring out of nothing. When Knight of Cups is upright, it represents creativity, romance, charm, imagination, beauty. When it’s reversed, it represents an overactive imagination, unrealistic ideas, jealousy, and moodiness.
Tarot card meaning of the Queen of Cups
This tarot card shows an ethereal queen sitting on a stone throne decorated with images of the sea. The cup she is holding is closed, and her feet don’t touch the water.
This represents the unconscious mind, as well as the idea that the woman is not overwhelmed by her emotions, but she is in tune with them within her mind.
When the Queen of Cups card is upright, it represents compassion, caring, being emotionally stable, intuitive, and inflow. When it’s reversed, it represents inner feelings, self-care, self-love, and codependency.
Tarot card meaning of the King of Cups
This tarot card shows a king on his stone throne in the middle of the turbulent sea. He is calm, cool and collected. He holds a cup, representing his emotions and creativity, in one hand and a scepter, representing his power, in the other.
He does not focus on the cup because he has already mastered his emotions. When the King of Cups is upright, it represents emotional balance, compassion, and diplomacy. When it is reversed, it represents self-compassion, inner feelings, moodiness, and being emotionally manipulative.
See What The Universe Has In Store For You
Kayla Baptista is a writer who covers astrology, pop culture, and relationship topics.