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Minor Arcana · Suit of Cups · Number card
Ace · Cups
A card that falls upside down is read reversed.
Key words
↑ UprightAn open heartLove offeredFullness
↓ ReversedA false heartUnsettled feelingLove held back
What it means
↑ Upright
Feeling at its source: a cup held out from the cloud and running over on every side, the beginning of a love, a friendship or a joy with more in it than can be drunk at once. Waite calls it the house of the true heart. Receive it with both hands — say what you feel, and let others give to you without counting what you owe.
↓ Reversed
Tip the cup and the streams run out of reach: feeling that refuses to settle, warmth offered with little behind it, or a heart kept shut because opening it once went badly. Before trusting a kind word, yours or anyone's, ask whether it holds steady when nothing is being asked in return.
An ace is a root or gift, and in Cups the gift is feeling itself: love, affection or joy at its source. In the 1909 Smith–Waite deck, this card shows a hand from a cloud holding a cup that pours streams into a pool of water lilies, while a dove descends to drop a wafer marked with a cross into it. Dove and wafer are Christian emblems of grace, so the cup is filled from above, not by effort.
Upright
House of the true heart, joy, content, abode, nourishment, abundance, fertility; Holy Table, felicity hereof.
Reversed
House of the false heart, mutation, instability, revolution.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Part III.