Court cards in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck are conventionally read on two axes at once, an outer or inner orientation and an elemental one: Kings and Knights are read as outward and active, Queens and Pages as inward and receptive, while each rank additionally carries its suit's element in a particular register. The Queen of Cups is the water suit's inward, nurturing mastery, and Pamela Colman Smith marks this with a detail found on no other court card in the deck: her cup alone, of all sixteen court cards' emblems, is closed, an ornate, shrine-like vessel rather than an open bowl.
The closed cup is usually read as the visual key to the whole card, feeling held rather than displayed, depth kept rather than poured out, and the reading survives largely intact across every deck that keeps Smith's general composition. The Marseille tradition has no equivalent scene; its Reine de Coupe, like every Marseille court card, is a static heraldic figure holding the suit emblem with no narrative detail at all, so the closed-cup reading is entirely a Rider-Waite-Smith contribution rather than an older inheritance.
The Thoth deck, where the equivalent water queen keeps the title Queen of Cups within Crowley and Harris's Knight, Queen, Prince, Princess scheme, replaces Smith's seated figure with a geometric design built around a lotus and shell motif, retaining the theme of depth held in reserve but abandoning the closed-vessel image specifically.