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Minor Arcana · Suit of Cups · Number card
Six · Cups
A card that falls upside down is read reversed.
Key words
↑ UprightFond memoriesSimple kindnessChildhood
↓ ReversedLooking aheadRenewalLeaving the past
What it means
↑ Upright
Here the past is a gift rather than a weight: children in an old garden, one handing another a cup of flowers. The card turns toward childhood, home and a time that felt simpler, and toward the plain kindness that belongs to them. Draw on what those memories gave you, and pass something of it on — a small gift nobody asked for.
↓ Reversed
Memory loosens its hold, and the face turns toward what has not yet happened. The old reading is renewal; modern readers add a warning against living in the old garden. Keep what was good in the past as a root rather than a home, and give your attention to whatever in front of you is still to be shaped.
Six brings exchange, and in Cups it is the simple giving of affection, often tied to memory. In the 1909 Smith–Waite deck, this card shows the courtyard of an old house, where the taller of two children bends to offer the smaller a cup planted with white five-pointed flowers, while a guard walks away behind them. The setting is childhood, made safe by the passing guard; the flowers are a gift with nothing asked back.
Upright
A card of the past and of memories, looking back, as—for example—on childhood; happiness, enjoyment, but coming rather from the past; things that have vanished. Another reading reverses this, giving new relations, new knowledge, new environment, and then the children are disporting in an unfamiliar precinct.
Reversed
The future, renewal, that which will come to pass presently.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Part III.