Six of Cups Tarot Card Meaning

Six of Cups upright

Children play in an old garden with cups filled with flowers. Waite calls it a card of the past: memories, childhood, happiness and things that have vanished — and, in another reading, new relations and new surroundings. Reconnect with simple joys or with someone from earlier days.

Six of Cups reversed

Waite reversed gives the future, renewal and things that will soon come to pass. Let the past rest and look ahead.

A reversed card (What does Upright / reversed card mean?) is one drawn upside-down.

Is Six of Cups a yes or no?

Upright: Leans yes. A gentle yes — especially if it involves the past or old friends.

Reversed: Reversed, Six of Cups reads as mixed — not a clear yes or no: the future, renewal, moving on.

The yes/no lean is BornClock’s reading convention drawn from the card’s meaning — Waite himself did not assign one.

Symbolism in the Six of Cups card

What appears in the 1909 Rider–Waite–Smith picture, as Waite describes it:

• Children in an old garden — childhood and memory
• Cups filled with flowers — Waite: happiness drawn from earlier times

In Waite’s own words (paraphrased)

Upright: a card of the past and of memories; happiness, enjoyment from the past; new relations, new environment (another reading).

Reversed: the future, renewal, that which will come to pass presently.

Source: A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910, public domain). Some of Waite’s 1910 fortune-telling meanings are old-fashioned; the plain-English reading above is ours.