Cups

When Cups dominate, you are in feeling. Love, grief, friendship, longing, imagination, the dream, the bond, the loneliness. The traditional element is water. Recognise it: vessels, rivers, sea, fish, reflections, figures who hold, pour, toast, or stare into what they carry.

Water seeks and fills and reflects. It also stagnates and floods. A Cup can be genuine love. A Cup can be a mood you are drowning in and calling fate. Read the water in this picture, not a rule that cups mean romance.

The Ace is the opening of the heart, a gift of feeling. Twos meet. Threes celebrate or gather. Fours turn inward, sometimes bored with plenty. Fives spill and mourn. Sixes remember. Sevens dream and choose among fantasies. Eights leave. Nines sit with a fullness of wish. Tens show a family of feeling, a completion of the water story, with all the sweetness and all the complication that implies.

The courts are stances in water: first reach toward feeling, the pursuit of it, the inner inhabiting of it, the outer responsibility for it. A King of Cups is not a nice man by default. He is water in a public seat, which can be mature feeling or feeling used as weather control.

Five: disruption after structure. Cups: water, feeling, bond. The image: a cloaked figure, spilled cups, often two still standing, a river, a bridge.

Traditional notes: grief, regret, focusing on what is lost. Structure gets you there: the fifth has arrived in the field of feeling, something has spilled. The image then tells you whether the figure can turn toward what remains. That turn is in the picture. It is not a pep talk you glue on.