Minor Arcana · Cups · Number 2
Two of Cups
two people meeting each other properly
Element
Water · feeling, attachment, imagination and what you are loyal to
The card in tarot
What Two of Cups means
In the Rider–Waite–Smith image
A man and a woman face each other, each holding a cup, about to exchange them. Between and above them rises a caduceus of two snakes topped by a winged lion's head.
In a reading
The meeting of two. Usually read as a partnership between equals rather than as attraction: a bargain, a truce, a friendship that both people are choosing. The exchange has not happened yet in the picture.
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
two people meeting each other properly
Reversed
imbalance, or a connection needing repair
Reversed, most readings are imbalance rather than ending: one cup filled by one person, or a partnership where the terms were never agreed.
The suit
Two 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 Two does
Across all four suits, the Two is two things held at once: a pairing, a balance, or a choice not yet made.
Two is the first number that can hold a relationship, so every Two in the deck is about something meeting something else.
The same rank in the other suits
Why Two 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.