Minor Arcana · Cups · Number 3
Three of Cups
friendship and shared relief
Element
Water · feeling, attachment, imagination and what you are loyal to
The card in tarot
What Three of Cups means
In the Rider–Waite–Smith image
Three women stand in a ring with their cups raised. Fruit and a pumpkin lie at their feet, so the harvest is already in. Nothing is being asked of them in the picture.
In a reading
Company. Friendship, a group that is glad of itself, a reunion, the celebration that is not about a couple. Readers often use it for the specific relief of being among people who already know you.
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
friendship and shared relief
Reversed
the crowd becoming the point, or a circle closing
Reversed, the usual readings are a third party disturbing a pair, or being socially present and privately absent.
The suit
Three 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 Three does
Across all four suits, the Three is the first result: what the effort has actually produced so far.
Three is where a thing becomes visible to other people. Three of the four are cards of growth; the fourth is the deck's most famous picture of grief.
The same rank in the other suits
Why Three 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.