Six of Cups
Six of Cups · Card 42 of 78
emotion, relationships, intuition
Tarot Reading →Upright keywords
- nostalgia
- childhood memories
- innocence
- reunion
- gentle past
Reversed keywords
Upright meaning
Children fill their cups with flowers in an old garden. The Six of Cups is memory in its kindliest light: childhood places, old friends, the smell of a grandmother's kitchen, tenderness without cost. Expect reunions, found photographs, messages from the past, or the return of your younger warmth. It usually arrives to remind you of something you knew before experience complicated it, but keep one foot in today's garden. Kindness, simplicity, and play are available again, and are not naive in an adult who chose them. The past cannot be poured again, and it can still water things.
Reversed meaning
Reversed, the garden gate sticks. Either the past has become a residence rather than a visit, the golden memory replaying while the present waits unpaid, or a healthy release is underway, packing the keepsakes, forgiving the childhood street, stepping into unfamiliar ground. Both readings share one instruction: face forward. Reunions or old ties resurfacing now deserve fresh eyes rather than the old script; people change, including you. Watch the temptation to dust off former selves instead of making new ones. What was good back there travels well if carried lightly. Leave the gate open behind you, but walk out.
Classical excerpt — The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911), Part III §2
Divinatory Meanings: A card of the past and of memories, looking back, as—for example—on childhood; happiness, enjoyment, but coming rather from the past; things that have vanished. Another reading reverses this, giving new relations, new knowledge, new environment, and then the children are disporting in an unfamiliar precinct. Reversed: The future, renewal, that which will come to pass presently.