Ace of Cups
As de Coupe (Tarot de Marseille) · Ace of Chalices · Root of the Powers of Water (Golden Dawn)
A hand from a cloud offers an overflowing chalice as a dove descends with a wafer: the Ace of Cups is read as the beginning of love, feeling and grace.
Upright new love · emotional fulfilment · compassion · intuition · abundance · spiritual gift
Reversed emotional block · emptiness · repressed feelings · unrequited love · need for self-love
- Astrology
- The root of Water; rules the quarter of the heavens around Scorpio
- Element
- Water
- Number
- 1
- Golden Dawn title
- The Root of the Powers of Water
- Yes or no
- Yes
Upright
The Ace of Cups is the heart opening. In the Waite–Smith tradition it signifies the start of love, emotional renewal, compassion and the sense of being filled from a source beyond oneself. Waite called it the house of the true heart, joy, content, abode, nourishment, abundance and fertility, and linked its image with the Holy Table of the altar.
Love and relationships: a new relationship, a deepening of feeling, reconciliation, or news of a birth; love given and received without calculation.
Work and money: work that feeds the soul, creative inspiration, a caring profession, generosity returned; emotional rather than financial wealth, though the two can meet.
Advice: receive. Let yourself be moved, say what you feel, and let what fills you overflow into kindness toward others.
Reversed
Reversed, the cup is tilted or held back. Readers describe feelings that are blocked or denied, love offered but not returned, or an emptiness that no outward success can fill. Waite turned the meaning to the house of the false heart, with mutation, instability and revolution. An inward reading suggests that love needs first to be directed toward oneself, or that grace is being received privately and is not yet ready to be shared. Many readers do not use reversals and would find these cautions in the surrounding cards instead. Where the reversal is read, it asks what is stopping the water from flowing.
The image
A hand emerges from a cloud, holding a golden chalice on its open palm. Streams of water spill over the rim and fall into a pool below, where water lilies float. A white dove descends head-first toward the cup, holding in its beak a round wafer marked with a cross, as if about to place it inside. Drops shaped like the Hebrew letter Yod fall through the air on either side. On the body of the cup is a letter that looks like an inverted M or a W. Waite's text speaks of four streams pouring from the cup; the picture shows five.
History
The suit of cups (Italian coppe, French coupes) is one of the four Latin suits shared with Spanish and Italian playing cards, and cups already appear among the suit signs of the Mamluk cards from which European packs are thought to derive. In the Tarot de Marseille the Ace of Cups is a large ornamented vessel often compared to a fountain or a church building. Before 1909 most decks left the numbered minors unillustrated, and Smith's design for the Rider pack, drawn under Waite's direction, turns this ace into an unmistakably eucharistic image. It echoes the legend of the Holy Grail, which fascinated Waite throughout his life; his Hidden Church of the Holy Graal appeared in 1909, the same year as the deck. For the wider story, see the history of tarot.
Symbolism
The Golden Dawn named the card the Root of the Powers of Water and placed it, with the other aces, in Kether, the crown of the Tree of Life, without a planet or sign. Water is the element of feeling, receptivity and the unconscious. The dove is the traditional Christian image of the Holy Spirit and the wafer the host of the Mass; together they make the cup a Grail, filled from above. The yods are drops of grace, and the lilies on the pool are growth rooted in the waters of emotional life. The letter on the cup has been read as a reversed M for Mary or as a W for Waite; neither interpretation is confirmed by Waite himself.
In a reading
Readers treat it as one of the most auspicious cards for love and emotional matters. With the Two of Cups or the Lovers a new relationship is strongly suggested; with the Empress fertility or a creative birth. Beside the Ace of Wands passion and feeling begin together. Its appearance in a spread is often taken as a sign of grace or renewal, even in a difficult situation.
Sources and further reading
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot — A. E. Waite, 1910
- The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City — Michael Dummett, 1980
- The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination — Robert M. Place, 2005
- Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot: The True Story of the World's Most Popular Tarot — Marcus Katz & Tali Goodwin, 2015
- The Encyclopedia of Tarot — Stuart R. Kaplan, 1978