cups
No image of this card
Lady Frieda Harris painted the deck between 1938 and 1943; it was first published in 1969, seven years after her death in 1962. The paintings remain in copyright until 2032 in the UK and EU and 2064 in the United States, so no card images or substitutes appear here.
See the deck at its publisher ↗The Princess of the Waters; the Lotus of the Palace of the Floods
Suit: Cups Minor Arcana Element: Water
Also known as Page of Chalices.
Page of Cups: feeling and imagination taking an unexpected communicable form. 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 Book of Thoth remains in copyright. The catalogue therefore gives the deck's titles, ranks and numbering beside the Golden Dawn material it inherits, while citing Crowley by page without reproducing his text.
This deck calls the card Princess of Cups; it is filed here as Page of Cups.
This deck's book publishes no upright and reversed lists, so none are shown. Its account of the card is cited below rather than reproduced.
The card is indexed as the Page of Cups; Book T ranks it Princess, while the Thoth deck prints Princess. Its Golden Dawn place is Princess / final Heh · Earth of Water. Book T titles it The Princess of the Waters; the Lotus of the Palace of the Floods.
Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris, Thoth — Part Three: The Court Cards.
Page of Cups
A youthful figure studies a cup from which a fish unexpectedly rises, against a background of moving water.
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 Page with service, study, reflection, a message and imagination applied to practical matters. Reversed, it can indicate seduction, deception, artificiality or an unexamined inclination.
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 Princess of the Waters; the Lotus of the Palace of the Floods
Book T's formal title for this court card.
Water · Cups
Cups express the powers of Water: receptivity, relationship, imagination, pleasure and emotional experience.
Princess / final Heh · Earth 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.
One polar quadrant above the water sign Scorpio
The twelve King/Knight, Queen and Prince/King cards bridge zodiac signs; the four Princess/Page cards instead rule polar quadrants.
Sweetness, imagination and kindness take form gently, but can become indolent, selfish or luxurious.
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 |