Minor Arcana · Cups · Court card
King of Cups
steadiness in feeling, without coldness
Element
Water · feeling, attachment, imagination and what you are loyal to
The card in tarot
What King of Cups means
In the Rider–Waite–Smith image
A king sits on a throne floating on a choppy sea. A fish leaps on one side and a ship rides the swell on the other. He holds a cup and a short sceptre, and his feet are dry.
In a reading
Emotional authority. Read as the person who stays steady when everyone else is not: a counsellor, a parent, a leader who can be told bad news. The rough water is the point; the throne is not on land.
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
steadiness in feeling, without coldness
Reversed
control mistaken for calm, or feeling used as leverage
Reversed, readings turn on the calm being a lid: feeling suppressed rather than governed, or a steadiness that has gone cold.
The suit
King 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 court rank
What the King does
Across all four suits, the King is the suit held outwardly: authority, mastery and responsibility for others.
The King is the element turned into a position. What he governs, and how well, is the suit's final question.
The same rank in the other suits
Why King 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.