Four of Cups

The Plate

The hand from the cloud has come back. It is the same hand that offers the aces, cloud and all, holding out a fourth cup at the left of the frame — and the young man does not see it. He sits under a tree with arms crossed and legs crossed, a double closure, and looks down at the three cups standing in the grass in front of him. They are upright and full. Nothing is spilled here, nothing broken; this is the Five's grief with all the loss removed and the posture kept. Waite (1911) reads discontent in him, a man wearied by his environment, and the plate agrees in every line: the mouth set, the gaze aimed at the cups without interest, the tree taking his weight.

The Reading

The card is about satiation, which is harder to sympathize with than loss and more common. Three cups were presumably wanted once. Now they stand in the grass like furniture, and the feeling that filled them has gone flat — not through any fault of the cups. What the picture argues, by staging the cloud in plain view, is that the remedy is already present and simply outside the angle of his attention. The offer is not withheld. It is unwatched.

Reversed, the head turns. The classical reading gives the reversal to novelty and new instruction — the fourth cup noticed at last — though a man can also register the offer and refuse it, which is a different card in everything but the picture.

In the School

Cups belong to Water, the suit of feeling in the table of the elements taught in Foundations of Astrology. The fours show each element at rest, and Water at rest goes stale sooner than the others.