Nine of Cups

The Nine of Cups occupies the middle decan of Pisces in the water suit's zodiacal sequence, ruled by Jupiter, the planet of expansion and good fortune, and carrying the Golden Dawn title Material Happiness. Its long popular nickname, the wish card, is not a Golden Dawn or Waite invention but a piece of twentieth-century cartomantic folklore that has attached itself firmly enough to the card that most modern guidebooks repeat it without explanation.

Pamela Colman Smith's picture, a satisfied man seated with arms crossed before a curved counter bearing nine cups arranged like a display, is a considerably more self-contained image than most of her Cups pips, showing satisfaction achieved rather than sought, in contrast to the reaching, offering or dancing figures found on several neighboring cards. The Marseille pattern gives none of this, showing nine cups in a lattice with no figure, and cartomancers working that pattern read the card from number and suit for material comfort generally, without the specifically wish-granting sense later attached to Smith's picture.

The Thoth deck, keeping the title Happiness, renders the nine cups as a lotus-form geometric arrangement built on Jupiter's glyph, and Crowley's own commentary is notably more guarded than the wish-card folklore, warning that the card can describe a satisfaction that is complacent rather than earned, closer to smugness than to fulfillment, a caution that Smith's picture, with its folded arms and slightly self-satisfied expression, arguably supports better than the popular nickname does.

Upright the Nine of Cups is read as satisfaction, comfort and, per its popular name, a wish granted; reversed, as smugness, overindulgence, or a satisfaction that proves shallower than expected once examined.

The wish-card reputation deserves some skepticism as a source claim: it does not appear in Waite's own 1910 text, which gives the more modest concord, contentment, physical wellbeing for the upright card, and it is not part of the Golden Dawn's Book T material either. It is best treated as a later layer of popular cartomantic tradition, genuinely widespread in current practice but no older than the mid twentieth century as far as the printed record shows, and readers who present it as ancient are passing off a relatively recent convention as something ancestral.

Because of its reputation, the card is disproportionately likely to be drawn into questions phrased as wishes or hopes, and experienced readers generally treat this with some caution, since a card's folk reputation can lead a querent to hear more certainty in a reading than the tradition actually supports. The reversed meaning, smugness or a wish that satisfies less than hoped, functions partly as a corrective to the upright card's popularity, a reminder built into the system that comfort achieved is not the same as comfort that was worth having.

Waite's reversed meanings, imperfection, mistakes and defect, are notably harsher and less psychological than the smugness reading now standard.