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Minor Arcana · Suit of Cups · Number card
Five · Cups
A card that falls upside down is read reversed.
Key words
↑ UprightLoss and regretGriefWhat remains
↓ ReversedComing backOld ties renewedAcceptance
What it means
↑ Upright
Three cups are spilled, and the cloaked figure has eyes for nothing else — not the two still standing behind him, nor the bridge leading home. The loss is real, and so is a grief that keeps looking at what is gone. Let the sorrow have its time, then turn around and count what is left.
↓ Reversed
Turned around at last, the figure sees the cups still standing and the road home. Here the card favors return — to family, to old allies, to people you share a history with — though Waite also warns of false projects. Welcome what comes back, and test any scheme that promises to undo the loss before you lean on it.
Five is strain, and in Cups the strain is loss: a hope, a bond or a plan that has spilled away. In the 1909 Smith–Waite deck, this card shows a figure in a long black cloak, head bowed over three overturned cups, while two still stand upright behind; across a river, a bridge leads to a small castle. The black cloak is mourning; the bridge and the upright cups are what grief, for now, leaves out of view.
Upright
It is a card of loss, but something remains over; three have been taken, but two are left; it is a card of inheritance, patrimony, transmission, but not corresponding to expectations; with some interpreters it is a card of marriage, but not without bitterness or frustration.
Reversed
News, alliances, affinity, consanguinity, ancestry, return, false projects.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Part III.