cups
Suit: Cups Minor Arcana Element: Water
Also known as Knight of Chalices.
Knight of Cups: an invitation or emotional approach carried with grace. 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.
Graceful, but not warlike; riding quietly, wearing a winged helmet, referring to those higher graces of the imagination which sometimes characterize this card. He too is a dreamer, but the images of the side of sense haunt him in his vision.
A. E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith, Rider–Waite–Smith — Part III, §2, The Lesser Arcana — Knight of Cups.
Knight of Cups · The Lord of the Waves and the Waters; the King of the Hosts of the Sea
A calm armoured rider advances while presenting a cup, his winged helmet and measured horse suggesting imaginative rather than warlike purpose.
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 Knight with arrival, invitation, approach, proposition and a messenger. Reversed, it can indicate trickery, fraud, duplicity or artifice.
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 Lord of the Waves and the Waters; the King of the Hosts of the Sea
Book T's formal title for this court card.
Water · Cups
Cups express the powers of Water: receptivity, relationship, imagination, pleasure and emotional experience.
King / Yod · Fire 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° Aquarius to 20° Pisces
The twelve King/Knight, Queen and Prince/King cards bridge zodiac signs; the four Princess/Page cards instead rule polar quadrants.
Emotion acts through grace, poetry and enthusiasm, with sensuality or untruth as possible distortions.
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 |