Six of Cups

The Six of Cups falls at the middle decan of Scorpio in the Golden Dawn's zodiacal scheme for the water suit, ruled by the Sun and carrying the title Pleasure, between the Five under Mars and the Seven under Venus at Scorpio's third decan. The choice of the Sun for a card about childhood and nostalgia is often read as one of Book T's more counterintuitive pairings, sunlight standing here for warmth of memory rather than for vitality or will as it does elsewhere in the small cards.

Pamela Colman Smith's picture, a child offering another a flower-filled cup in an old courtyard, has no equivalent in the Tarot de Marseille, where the Six of Cups is six cups in a formal lattice, read by cartomancers from number and suit rather than from any scene of childhood. The garden setting recalls the Nine of Pentacles and the Four of Wands, two of the deck's other walled-garden images, and the recurrence of enclosed, cultivated space across otherwise unrelated cards is sometimes cited as evidence of how much of Smith's visual vocabulary she reused deliberately across the eighty pips rather than inventing fresh settings for each.

The Thoth deck keeps the title Pleasure and, in Harris's usual method, replaces the courtyard scene with a purely geometric composition of six cups arranged around a solar motif, dropping the child imagery entirely along with the specific reading of nostalgia it supports; Crowley's own text treats the card more broadly as sensory pleasure in general rather than as memory specifically.

Upright the Six of Cups is read as nostalgia, innocence and simple affection recalled; reversed, as an inability to leave the past, comfort sought in what is already gone rather than in what is present.

Waite's printed meaning stresses the past directly, memories, childhood associations, things that belong to yesterday, and gives little sense of the card as a caution; the warning against dwelling in the past that most contemporary readers now attach to the upright card is largely a later addition, one that grew alongside a broader twentieth-century reading culture more interested in psychological growth than Waite's own generation was. Read strictly from his 1910 text, the Six of Cups is closer to a simple, warm memory than to a diagnosis of avoidance.

The card is also one of several in the deck commonly given to questions about children, family of origin or early relationships specifically, on the reasoning that its central figures are themselves children; this narrower, more literal reading sits alongside the broader nostalgia reading without replacing it, and which one a given reader reaches for often depends on the question asked rather than on any rule fixed by the tradition.

Reversed, most modern practice reads the card as an invitation to notice when comfort in the past has started to substitute for living in the present, a reading closer to twentieth-century therapeutic language than to Waite's own more modest description of the upright card.