Tarot · Cups
Six of Cups
Six of Cups - Water
Correspondences
- Element
- Water
- Planet
- Sun
- Sign
- Scorpio
- Number
- 6
- Yes / no
- Yes upright, Maybe reversed
Traditional Golden Dawn attributions. The yes / no value is a convention for single-card questions, not a prediction.
Upright
The past is offering comfort, connection, or an unexpected reunion.
Six of Cups. The past is offering comfort, connection, or an unexpected reunion. As a Six it is recovery after the crisis: equilibrium restored, usually with help, and usually with something given away to get it. In Cups, that stage plays out in emotion, attachment and intuition. Its sign is Scorpio, which goes underneath: what is concealed, what is intense, and a refusal to accept the surface account of anything. Being Water, it resolves below the surface, on feeling rather than argument. Its keyword range runs through nostalgia, fond memory, innocence, and a comforting reunion.
Reversed
Nostalgia has become a hiding place from the present.
Six of Cups reversed. Nostalgia has become a hiding place from the present. Under the Sun, its action is to make plain and to centre: what it touches becomes visible, and becomes the thing everything else arranges itself around. Reversed here, it is loosening rather than failing. The grip of this is coming off, and the reversal reads as release rather than denial. Its keyword range, to be read here as difficulty, delay, or a lesson not yet learned: stuck in the past, idealizing what was, unresolved history, and forgiveness overdue.
About the Tarot
A 15th-century Italian card game that was turned to fortune-telling only 350 years later.
The upright and reversed meanings here follow the mainstream Rider-Waite-Smith reading tradition. A reversed card is treated as the same force blocked, turned inward, or overexpressed - not simply as its opposite.
Full history →Meanings are a guide to a symbolic tradition, offered for reflection and entertainment. They do not predict the future or describe real people or events. See the Terms.