36-Ace of Cups – Upright Rider Waite Deck

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Your Chosen Card – Ace of Cups Upright Rider Waite Deck

When upright, the Ace of Cups suggests new beginnings in your emotional life. You are experiencing a period of joy, contentment, camaraderie, feasting, affection, and creativity. Love and fertility are in the air. It is possible to deepen a current relationship or to start a new friendship or love interest. Artists find themselves full of creative ideas. The nurturing waters of the Ace of Cups represent a fertile time, able to produce offspring of the body or the mind. Moving spiritual experiences and opportunities for compassion also accompany this card.

Keywords Upright: Pleasure, feasting, enjoyment, love, friendship, receptivity, fulfillment, fertility, pregnancy, nurturing, healing, creative inspiration, a new relationship, the beginning of romance, good cheer; ‘eat, drink, and be merry.’

Timing: Astrologically, Water is linked to summertime.
Astrology: Root-force of elemental Water, the element associated with the season of summer.
Number Symbolism: 1 – initial spark, will, creation, beginnings, new life.

Rider Waite: The waters are beneath, and thereon are water-lilies; the hand issues from the cloud, holding in its palm the cup, from which four streams are pouring; a dove, bearing in its bill a cross-marked Host, descends to place the Wafer in the Cup; the dew of water is falling on all sides. It is an intimation of that which may lie behind the Lesser Arcana. Divinatory Meanings: House of the true heart, joy, content, abode, nourishment, abundance, fertility; Holy Table, felicity hereof; (R) house of the false heart, mutation, instability, revolution, unexpected change of position.

When Ace of Cups is upright you can pretty much take it that life is going well but that’s when life takes us by surprise.  If Ace of Cups is unclear it may help to choose a card from the Major Arcana to provide more insight into what it is Ace of Cups is trying to tell you.  If you had a particular issue in  mind, or want to seek clarification on something else, you can also choose again to get more guidance.

This chosen card is part of your upright card reading for Ace of Cups using cards from the Rider Waite Tarot Deck. You will find many more tarot pages that will be of great help if you need tarot card meanings. Use the search at the bottom of the page. We have some amazing tarot books for you to browse. Please see below.

Here are some snippets from a few of my favorite books

Complete Book of Tarot
Book Details
Complete Book of Tarot: In Llewellyn’s Classic Tarot, a hand comes out of a cloud on the right-hand side of the card, holding a chalice upright in the light blue sky. Of the four Aces in the Classic Tarot, only the Ace of Cups is offered by a hand emerging from the right-hand side of the card. Inside this chalice sits a dove bearing an olive branch, a symbol of peace. Water overflows the brim of the chalice creating five streams pouring into the body of water below, on whose surface rest five lotus blossoms. In Christian symbolism, the dove represents the Holy Spirit sent by God the Father as a symbol of divine love after the sacrifice of Christ on the cross to save humankind. The five streams and five lotus blossoms—symbols of redemption through sacrifice—are a reference to the five wounds Christ endured during his crucifixion. The Catholic Mass still makes use of the chalice to commemorate this event. There is a noticeable absence of dry land in the image on this card, as water and clouds dominate the scene.

Tarot Books

Creative Tarot: The Rider-Waite-Smith differed from most decks in one important aspect: for the first time since the Sola Busca, all of the cards, including the Minor Arcana, were fully illustrated with human figures and other symbolic imagery. This is the full separation mark of the tarot from a deck of playing cards to a deck of divination cards. And this is where much of the meaning of the Minor Arcana cards became consolidated. Most of that is due to Smith’s artwork. Waite wrote a few guides to the tarot, manuals on how to interpret each card, but Smith’s imagery is what people remember, not Waite’s definitions. Waite believed it was his writings and scholarship that would newly define the tarot, but it turns out that sometimes the brush is even more powerful than the pen.

Complete Book of Tarot: It’s a sign that you don’t respect the value of the tarot if you don’t charge for your readings.

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Complete Book of Tarot: You must get certified by an ‘official’ tarot organization to become a legitimate reader (as far as I know, the tarot community has not yet elected a Pope or Papess).