Minor Arcana · Cups · Number 6
Six of Cups
memory and old sweetness, sometimes the past calling
Element
Water · feeling, attachment, imagination and what you are loyal to
The card in tarot
What Six of Cups means
In the Rider–Waite–Smith image
In a walled courtyard, an older child hands a cup filled with white flowers to a smaller one. Five more flowered cups stand around them. A figure walks away in the background.
In a reading
Memory and kindness. Read as nostalgia, as an old friendship resurfacing, or as a gesture made for no return. The safety of the courtyard is part of the meaning: this is the past as a place you are allowed to visit.
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
memory and old sweetness, sometimes the past calling
Reversed
nostalgia doing the work the present should
Reversed, readings turn on living in the memory: a past kept warmer than it was, or an inability to be here now.
The suit
Six 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 Six does
Across all four suits, the Six is recovery, exchange and movement away from the Five.
Six is the answer the deck gives to Five. In all four suits something is given, carried or crossed.
The same rank in the other suits
Why Six 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.