Minor Arcana · Cups · Number 5
Five of Cups
grief with your back to what remains
Element
Water · feeling, attachment, imagination and what you are loyal to
The card in tarot
What Five of Cups means
In the Rider–Waite–Smith image
A figure in a black cloak stands with head bowed over three spilled cups. Two cups stand upright behind them, unnoticed. A bridge crosses the river to a castle on the far bank.
In a reading
Grief with something left. The card is honest about loss: three really are spilled. It is also specific about attention, because the two standing cups and the bridge home are both in the picture and neither is being looked at.
What this card does not mean
It is not a card of total loss, and the two upright cups are not a consolation prize invented by modern readers. Smith drew them in.
Upright and reversed
Reversals are a choice, not a rule. Roughly half of readers never use them and read every card upright; those who do treat a reversed card as the same card under pressure rather than as its opposite.
Upright
grief with your back to what remains
Reversed
turning around; grief loosening its grip
Reversed, the common reading is the turn: seeing what remains, or the beginning of walking back across the bridge.
The suit
Five of Cups is a Cups card
Cups are the suit of the inner weather. Love is the obvious reading and the narrow one: the suit also covers grief, friendship, memory, artistic feeling and the things you cannot argue yourself out of. Its cards are the quietest in the deck, and several of them show a person alone with something they are choosing to look at or refusing to.
A Cup is not automatically a romance, and the difficult Cups are not punishments. Water cards describe what is being felt rather than what is being done about it.
Cups is the suit of Water, and it is the suit that became Hearts in an ordinary playing-card deck.
The other thirteen Cups
The number
What the Five does
Across all four suits, the Five is loss, friction and the moment the pattern breaks.
Five sits at the midpoint of the pip cards and every Five is difficult. The deck puts its rupture in the middle of each suit rather than at the end.
The same rank in the other suits
Why Five of Cups is not a birth card
AsterNym’s birth card comes from adding up a birth date and reducing it, which can only ever land between 1 and 22. Those are the Major Arcana, so no Minor Arcana card is anyone’s birth card and this page does not offer one. The minors are in the draw pool, where any of the 78 can come up.