Six of Cups

Arcana

Minor Arcana — one of the fifty-six

Suit

Cups — the Water suit

The suit covers

feeling, relationships and what you are attached to

Rank

Six — the recovery

Place in the suit

sixth of fourteen

Pip or court

Pip card — one of the forty

Numbered alongside

The Lovers (VI), the Major sharing this number

Upright

Nostalgia, childhood, old ties returning

Reversed

Living in the past, an outgrown comfort, homesickness for a version that has moved on

Listing position

card 42 of 78 as the deck is written out

Nothing on this page is calculated from your birth details or your name — the readings below are the traditional attributions for the Six of Cups, written plainly. The one part of it that is arithmetic, and exact, is how often a card of this kind actually turns up; that has its own section further down.

What the Six of Cups means

Nostalgia, old ties, something from childhood surfacing. Sweet, and worth checking you are not living there.

The Six of Cups is the sixth of the fourteen Cups cards, and in the numbering every suit follows, the Six is the recovery: the way out of the five, in the suit's own manner. Cups is the Water suit, so the question a Six puts — how does this suit put itself back together — is answered here in terms of feeling, relationships and what you are attached to. That pairing is the whole card. Change the suit and the recovery lands somewhere else entirely; change the rank and feeling, relationships and what you are attached to are still the subject but at a different point in its life.

Read the keyword line — nostalgia, childhood, old ties returning — as the short form of that, not as a separate meaning. It is the Water answer to how does this suit put itself back together, compressed to fit a table cell.

The Six of Cups reversed

Living in the past, an outgrown comfort, homesickness for a version that has moved on

A reversal is a shift of emphasis, not a negation. Upside down, the Six of Cups is still the recovery and it is still about feeling, relationships and what you are attached to — what changes is which way that is moving. One common habit is to hear a reversal as the stage not fully arrived at, which would put the reversed Six of Cups nearer Five of Cups — grief, loss, regret, attention on what spilled; the rank before it in Cups — than to its own upright line. That is a habit rather than a rule; several of the fifty-six read more comfortably reversed than upright, and which side the Six of Cups falls on is something the cards beside it settle.

Whether you read reversals at all is a house rule rather than a fact about the deck. If you do not, the Six of Cups carries its upright sense — nostalgia, childhood, old ties returning — and the cards either side of it do the work of saying how welcome that is.

Where the Six of Cups sits in Cups

The Cups run reaches the recovery at the Six, immediately after the Five of Cups and immediately before the Seven of Cups. Those two are the useful context: feeling, relationships and what you are attached to arrive at this card already carrying grief, loss, regret, attention on what spilled, and what follows it is choices, illusion, wishful thinking. The Six of Cups is the turn between them, not a standalone verdict.

A Six in the other three suits

Every suit passes through the recovery, and comparing the four is the fastest way to see what Cups in particular contributes. In Water the Six reads as nostalgia, childhood, old ties returning; the same number in the other three elements is recognisably the same stage put to a different subject. Because the Six is numbered 6, it is also the rank that answers to The Lovers (VI) in the Major Arcana — the same number one storey up, where the subject is a chapter of a life rather than feeling, relationships and what you are attached to.

Reading the Six of Cups in a spread

In a three-card spread read as setting, situation and direction of travel, the position changes the weight of the Six of Cups rather than its meaning:

• First — the setting. feeling, relationships and what you are attached to as the ground the question already stands on, with the Six saying the matter had reached the recovery before you asked.
• Second — the situation. the recovery as the live issue right now, in the Water terms Cups deals in: feeling, relationships and what you are attached to.
• Third — the direction. Where feeling, relationships and what you are attached to are heading: the way out of the five, in the suit's own manner, arriving rather than already here.

In a love reading

Where the Six lands in a love question depends on what Cups covers there — the feeling itself, which is what this suit is for, so a Cups card in a love reading is the centre of the question rather than a detail beside it. Put the recovery into that frame and the Six of Cups is asking how does this suit put itself back together about the relationship in those specific terms.

In a career reading

A Six in a career question is read through what Cups governs at work — how the work feels and who you are doing it with, which is a real part of a career question and rarely the part asked about — and the Six says which point of that a question has reached, which here is the recovery. So the Six of Cups answers a career question about feeling, relationships and what you are attached to rather than about the job in general.

How often the Six of Cups actually comes up

This is the part of a card page that can be checked, so it is worth stating exactly. Three cards drawn from seventy-eight means any named card — the Six of Cups included — appears in one three-card spread in 26, or 3.8% of the time. No card in the deck is rarer than another, and any page telling you its own card is unusual to draw is wrong about arithmetic rather than about tarot.

• At least one Cups card turns up in 45.2% of three-card spreads, and the Six of Cups is one of the fourteen it could be.
• At least one of the four Sixes turns up 14.8% of the time — roughly one spread in 7 — and three times out of four that card is not this one.
• At least one of the forty pip cards appears in 88.9% of spreads, so a draw with no pip in it at all is the unusual one.
• At least one of the fifty-six Minor Arcana appears in 98.0% of three-card spreads — the near-certainty that the widely quoted Major Arcana figure obscures.

Reversals do not change any of that. Whether the Six of Cups lands upright or reversed is a separate coin from whether it lands at all, which is worth remembering when a reversed card feels like it was aimed at you.

The full set of these figures, including what the most-feared cards actually add up to, is on the tarot page.

Six of Cups — common questions