cups
Suit: Cups Minor Arcana Element: Water
Also known as Two of Chalices.
Two of Cups: mutual recognition and the bond formed between two people. The card joins the water nature of Cups to its place in the numbered sequence.
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.
A youth and maiden are pledging one another, and above their cups rises the Caduceus of Hermes, between the great wings of which there appears a lion's head. It is a variant of a sign which is found in a few old examples of this card. Some curious emblematical meanings are attached to it, but they do not concern us in this place.
A. E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith, Rider–Waite–Smith — Part III, §2, The Lesser Arcana — Two of Cups.
Two of Cups · Love
A young pair exchange cups beneath a winged lion's head and a caduceus rising between them.
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 card with love, friendship, affinity, union, concord and sympathy. His principal entry gives no separate reversed meaning for this card.
Waite treats these as historical divinatory allocations and explicitly warns that they vary by context and are not a universal symbolic canon.
In the Golden Dawn system, all four Twos share a numerical relationship with one Hermetic Sephirah.
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 Love
Book T's formal decan-card title.
Water · Cups
Cups express the powers of Water: receptivity, relationship, imagination, pleasure and emotional experience.
Chokmah · Wisdom
In the Twos, active and receptive powers meet. The suit begins to generate and take direction, though its result is still young.
Venus in Cancer
Book T assigns each pip card from Two through Ten to one ten-degree decan of the zodiac.
Affinity joins separate people or powers through affection, harmony, pleasure and mutual response.
A concise paraphrase of Book T. Its dignity method modifies every decan card through the cards surrounding it.
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.