Six of Cups
Six de Coupe (Tarot de Marseille) · Six of Chalices · Pleasure (Thoth)
In an old garden a boy offers a girl a cup full of white flowers: the Six of Cups is read as memory, innocence and simple kindness.
Upright nostalgia · childhood · innocence · memories · kindness · reunion
Reversed living in the past · idealised memories · moving forward · leaving home · naivety
- Astrology
- Sun in Scorpio
- Element
- Water
- Number
- 6
- Golden Dawn title
- Lord of Pleasure
- Yes or no
- Yes
Upright
The Six of Cups looks backward with affection. In the Waite–Smith tradition it is a card of the past and of memories — Waite's own phrase — of childhood, of home, and of gifts given without calculation; happiness, but coming rather from the past. It can describe reunions, old friends returning and the comfort of familiar places.
Love and relationships: sweetness and simplicity, a childhood sweetheart, an old flame reappearing, gentle affection; renewed contact with family.
Work and money: returning to a former field, using skills learned long ago, work with children or with heritage; help from someone from your past.
Advice: honour where you came from and let it nourish you, but pass the gift forward. Memory is a garden to visit, not a house in which to lock the door.
Reversed
Reversed, the card turns toward the future. Waite gave it exactly this meaning — the future, renewal, that which will come to pass presently — and some modern readers follow him, reading the reversal as leaving the past behind or growing up and away from home. Others take it as nostalgia gone sour: clinging to an idealised history, or naivety about present realities. Many readers do not use reversals and choose between these senses by context. When the reversal is read, the question is whether the past is a resource or a refuge, and what it would mean to step out of the old garden.
The image
In the courtyard of an old house, a boy in a red hood bends toward a smaller girl and offers her a cup filled with white, star-shaped flowers. Five more cups, also full of flowers, stand around them, one on a stone pedestal bearing a shield marked with a saltire, the diagonal cross. In the background a man with a staff, perhaps a guard, walks away from the scene. Old buildings with steps and a tower frame the yard, and the light is a warm yellow. Waite described the scene simply as children in an old garden, their cups filled with flowers.
History
The Marseille Six of Cups stacks the cups in two columns of three around a central flowering stem, without figures. Smith's 1909 scene is wholly her own, and its storybook quality is often connected with her earlier work illustrating folk tales. Waite himself admitted two readings: the usual one of memory and the past, and another that reverses it — new relations, new knowledge, new surroundings, as if the children were playing in an unfamiliar precinct. The double meaning shows how freely the minor-arcana meanings floated before Smith's pictures fixed them in readers' minds.
Symbolism
The Golden Dawn called this card the Lord of Pleasure and gave it the Sun in Scorpio, in Tiphareth, the heart of the Tree of Life. Crowley's Thoth deck keeps the title Pleasure. Six is a number of harmony and exchange (see number 6), and here harmony takes the form of a simple gift. The white flowers are often read as innocence; the saltire on the pedestal recalls the cross of St Andrew; the departing guard suggests protection left behind as children grow. The enclosed yard is safety, and also a boundary that must one day be crossed.
In a reading
Readers frequently read it as an old friend, a former partner or a family matter returning. With the Five of Cups it may show grief bound up with memory; with the Page of Cups or the Sun it emphasises childlike joy; with Judgement the past is reviewed and released. In a past position it is literal; in a future position it can promise a reunion.
Some readers stress the generosity of the boy's gesture more than the nostalgia: the card can describe simple acts of kindness, gifts without strings, and the pleasure of caring for someone smaller or younger. In this sense it is a reminder that innocence is not only something lost but something that can be offered to others in the present.
Sources and further reading
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot — A. E. Waite, 1910
- The Book of Thoth — Aleister Crowley, 1944
- Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot: The True Story of the World's Most Popular Tarot — Marcus Katz & Tali Goodwin, 2015
- Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom — Rachel Pollack, 1980