Six of Cups

The Plate

The guard is leaving. Most accounts of this card never mention him, but there he goes in the background, a pikeman walking out of the courtyard and taking the adult world with him, so that the foreground can belong entirely to the children. Six cups stand about the old garden, each filled not with wine but with white star-shaped flowers — Waite (1911) needs only a line for it: children in an old garden, their cups filled with flowers. The taller child bends to hand one cup, flowers and all, to the smaller girl, who looks up at the giver rather than the gift. Around them the manor is old: worked stone, a shield bearing a saltire cross, a stair. Everything in the frame is either aged or very young.

The Reading

The card is memory, and the plate is honest about what memory is for: handing things on. The flowers grew somewhere back of the picture; the cups merely carry them, and the point of the scene is the passing, one small figure to another. Read upright, this is the past arriving as a gift — an old kindness resurfacing, a person from an earlier season, the sweetness of a place revisited and found still standing.

Reversed, the visit becomes a tenancy. The garden is a fine place to receive flowers and a poor place to live, and the reversal marks the moment nostalgia stops feeding the present and starts replacing it. The guard, remember, was walking away — someone has to hold the gate to the current year.

In the School

Cups carry Water, the suit of feeling in Foundations of Astrology's table of the elements. The sixes give each element its harmony, and Water's harmony runs backward as easily as forward.