Glossary
Cups: definition
The tarot suit associated with feeling, bond, sensitivity, receptivity, and relational life.
In the minor arcana, cups point to the emotional, loving, relational and inner register. They speak of what is felt, shared, received or contained —the whole set of emotional and relational dimensions of experience.
They should not be reduced to mere sentimentality. Cups can also evoke the depth of the bond, the quality of welcome, vulnerability, inner hospitality or the emotional richness of a situation.
In a symbolic approach, cups illuminate the way a person enters into relationship with themselves, with others and with lived experience. They point to the circulation of emotions, the capacity to listen and emotional memory.
As a suit, cups comprise ten numeral cards (from ace to ten) and four court cards (page, knight, queen and king of cups), that is fourteen cards in total. Each declines a particular nuance of the relational and emotional register.
A predominance of cups in a spread orients the reading toward the emotional and the relational, and invites observing how the person's emotions circulate and what place bonds hold in the situation at hand.
Read well, cups remind us that emotional life has its own depth: the quality of a bond, the capacity to give and receive, often matters more in a reading than any external fact.
Frequently asked questions
- Do cups speak only of love in tarot?
- No. They concern the whole emotional and relational register: love, friendship, family, hospitality, inner life, the quality of the bond with others. Love is only one of their declinations.
- What is the difference between cups and coins?
- Cups point to affect, the bond and interiority. Coins point to the concrete, the material and tangible stability. The two registers are complementary, not opposed.
- What do dominant cups mean in a spread?
- A predominance of cups generally indicates that the reading centres above all on the emotional, relational or affective dimension of the situation, rather than on its practical, mental or material dimension.
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