The Cup / Chalice is one of the magical weapons, or elemental tools, of Western ceremonial magic, the set of implements the magician consecrates and uses in ritual. It stands for the receptive, feeling and nourishing power; it holds and contains.
Tool and element
In the four-fold scheme it is attributed to the element of Water. The four elemental weapons, Wand, Cup, Sword and Pentacle, correspond to the four suits of the tarot's Minor Arcana and to the four points of the ritual circle, a scheme drawn together in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn from 1888 out of older Solomonic and grimoire material.
A vessel with older company
The ritual cup has no single grimoire pedigree as detailed as the sword's; its Golden Dawn role owes as much to the chalice of Christian liturgy and to medieval Grail literature's own vessel of plenty and revelation as to any Solomonic instruction, and the order's founders, working in a milieu steeped in comparative symbolism, drew the association deliberately rather than inheriting a single fixed source. Consecrated wine or water held in the cup during Golden Dawn and later derived rituals is typically used to bless or to be shared, keeping the working link between the vessel's symbolic receptivity and its ordinary, physical act of holding liquid. The weapon is described here as an element of that documented tradition of ceremonial magic, a body of practice studied historically rather than endorsed.