Minor Arcana · Cups · Court card
Knight of Cups
following what moves you, romance included
Element
Water · feeling, attachment, imagination and what you are loyal to
The card in tarot
What Knight of Cups means
In the Rider–Waite–Smith image
A knight rides a white horse at a walk, holding a cup out ahead of him. His helmet and heels carry wings. A stream crosses the ground in front of the horse.
In a reading
The offer being brought to you. The only Knight who is not hurrying: this one arrives with something in hand. Read as romance, an invitation, or a person who leads with feeling and means it at the time.
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
following what moves you, romance included
Reversed
following it past the point of sense
Reversed, readings are the offer that does not arrive, charm without follow-through, or moodiness dressed as depth.
The suit
Knight 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 Knight does
Across all four suits, the Knight is the suit at full tilt, committed and not yet wise.
The Knight is the only court figure in motion. Each one moves at the speed its element moves at, from the Swords' charge to the Pentacles' plod.
The same rank in the other suits
Why Knight 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.