cups
Suit: Cups Minor Arcana Element: Water
Also known as King of Chalices.
King of Cups: emotional steadiness and creative intelligence amid change. The card joins the water nature of Cups to its courtly role.
The card's place in the historical Minor Arcana sits beside its Golden Dawn correspondences and Waite's account of Pamela Colman Smith's image. Each reading keeps the source and deck that gave it shape.
8 sourced claims: 5 traditional , 3 modern
The meanings are Waite's own words from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. They belong to one influential school of reading and do not exhaust what the cards have meant in other hands.
He holds a short sceptre in his left hand and a great cup in his right; his throne is set upon the sea; on one side a ship is riding and on the other a dolphin is leaping. The implicit is that the Sign of the Cup naturally refers to water, which appears in all the court cards.
A. E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith, Rider–Waite–Smith — Part III, §2, The Lesser Arcana — King of Cups.
Prince of Cups · The Prince of the Chariot of the Waters
A crowned king holds cup and sceptre on a stone throne surrounded by waves, with a ship and dolphin in the distance.
A concise visual description of Pamela Colman Smith's 1910 design, checked against Waite's card entry and the public-domain scan.
Upright, Waite associates the King with responsibility, equity, art, science and helpful creative intelligence. Reversed, he can indicate dishonesty, injustice, vice or serious loss.
Waite treats these as historical divinatory allocations and explicitly warns that they vary by context and are not a universal symbolic canon.
Court cards are organised by rank, suit and elemental composition in Book T. They are listed separately because the source does not assign them to the numbered sephiroth in the way it assigns the pip cards.
Book T's formal title, Tree or elemental place, astrological attribution, and characteristic reading. This is the system used by the Hermetic Tree.
The Prince of the Chariot of the Waters
Book T's formal title for this court card.
Water · Cups
Cups express the powers of Water: receptivity, relationship, imagination, pleasure and emotional experience.
Prince / Vau · Air of Water
Book T uses King for the mounted figure now usually called Knight, Prince for the figure now usually called King, and Princess for the Page or Knave. The source's role is preserved here rather than silently modernised.
20° Libra to 20° Scorpio
The twelve King/Knight, Queen and Prince/King cards bridge zodiac signs; the four Princess/Page cards instead rule polar quadrants.
Feeling is directed through subtlety, craft and artistic intelligence, with manipulation or mercilessness when distorted.
A concise paraphrase of Book T's well- and ill-dignified characteristics.
Historical context and places where influential decks or occult systems differ.
One of the fifty-six suit cards in a standard Tarot pack: four suits of ten pip cards and four court cards.
The Met documents this structure in surviving fifteenth-century Tarot: Cups, Swords, Batons and Coins, each numbered from one to ten with king, queen, knight and knave. Occult correspondences developed later.
| Relation | To | First attested |
|---|---|---|
| Suit and element | Water | 1888 CE |