Your Chosen Card – Five of Cups Upright Rider Waite Deck
When upright, the Five of Cups depicts a scene of emotional disappointment. You are likely to have suffered a loss and to be focusing on the three overturned cups that have spilled their contents rather than on the two full cups that remain standing. Even though you feel dejected because of a separation or breakup, some hope of fulfillment remains. Sometimes your emotional fulfillment will need to come from within rather than from another person. Are you crying over spilt milk? Traditionally this card also stands for a gift or inheritance, but one that does not live up to your hopes and expectations. Though it may sound trite, remember that every dark cloud has a silver lining.
Keywords Upright: Loss with something remaining, good news mixed with bad, finding emotional fulfillment within, renewal of a relationship, ancestry, hope in the midst of apparent defeat, a gift or inheritance that does not meet expectations.
Timing: 0 Scorpio10 Scorpio. Tropical, 23 October2 November. Sidereal, 16 November24 November.
Astrology: Assertive and warlike Mars (dignified) in the first decan of watery Scorpio, realm of the Waite King/Thoth Prince of Cups (Air of Water) and Death (Scorpio). Mars is linked to the Tower.
Number Symbolism: 5 – instability, disruption, loss, crisis, tension, competition, conflict.
Rider Waite: A dark cloaked figure looking sideways at three prone cups; two others stand upright behind him; a bridge is in the background, leading to a small keep or holding. Divinatory Meanings: A card of loss, but something remains over; three have been taken, but two are left; it is a card of inheritance, patrimony, transmission, but not corresponding to expectations; with some interpreters it is a card of marriage, but not without bitterness or frustration; (R) news, alliances, affinity, consanguinity, ancestry, return, false projects.
When Five 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 Five of Cups is unclear it may help to choose a card from the Major Arcana to provide more insight into what it is Five 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 Five 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
Book Details
Creative Tarot: Which brings us to today. There have been many successful tarot decks since the Rider-Waite-Smith, like the Aquarius deck and the Morgan-Greer, both developed in the 1970s when the New Age movement started to gain mainstream acceptability, but almost all have followed the illustrative choices that Smith made. Its all but impossible to overstate her importance in how we use and think about the tarot today.
Complete Book of Tarot: The tarot always gives a correct answer, and any errors in a tarot reading are due to the practitioners failure to understand what the cards are saying, but
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Tarot Triumphs: Although the jongleurs peaked in the thirteenth century and were in decline by the fifteenth century, the period from which we have the first Tarot examples, they were by no means extinct. I have no direct evidence to show that the jongleurs had an early version of Tarot in their possession, but some of the Tarot Triumphs seem to be closely linked to their type of showman activities. At the very least, their work could have provided strong images for some of the early Trumps, as witnessed by the early creators of Tarot at jongleur performances. Or they could have been retained in folk memory as stock images even if the actual performances were not so prevalent anymore, just as we still have strong and rather romantic images of the highwayman, pirate, wandering minstrel, and May Queen in our heritage, even if they no longer exist in real life in that form.