Six of Cups
Six of Cups emphasizes memory, nostalgia, and how the past shapes our present expectations and emotional life. It reassures that happiness can persist after grief and warns that nostalgia can keep us from living fully in the present while sometimes signaling that something from the past will reappear. The card invites us to examine whether memories help or harm, and when they harm, to re-parent ourselves and create new, better memories starting now. Imagery of cups, rosemary, a cracked pot, chewed straw, a bloodied bandaid, and a crumpled item highlight both sweet recollections and lingering wounds, pointing toward healing and renewed joy.
Keywords
Card Title
Six of Cups
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Keywords:
Keywords List
Memory, the past (good or bad), finding joy after difficulty, tending the inner child.
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Meaning:
Primary Meaning
After grief, the 6 of Cups reminds us that happiness still lives. This card may find us indulging in nostalgia for better times or finding happiness in a shared memory, but it can also signal that we’re not living fully in the present. It can herald that something from our past will intersect our current lives.
Memory's Influence
But above all else, the 6 of Cups is a card about memory and the myriad ways it can influence our present and future. Happy memories will teach us to expect happiness. Not-so-happy memories will teach us the opposite. For those of us whose pasts have teeth, it can be hard to expect happiness, to trust it when it comes, or even to believe we deserve it. The 6 of Cups brings our attention to that: do our memories help us or harm us? If the latter, the 6 of Cups invites us to re-parent ourselves in these memories, to hold ourselves through them, to be the solace and support that we never had. When looking backwards hurts too much, this card says that we can make new memories, better ones, starting now. When our pasts have taught us that joy and happiness, sweetness and love, aren’t available to us, the 6 of Cups says oh yes they are.
Imagery
The six cups in our card recall happy memories of tooth fairies and firefly jars, cold sodas and beach trips in summer. A rosemary plant references remembrance and our roots. But not all is perfect: the pot is cracked, the straw chewed, the bandaid bloodied. In the waste basket, something is crumpled: a memory, perhaps, best forgotten.
Trailing Punctuation
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Visual Description
A narrow shelf divided into compartments holds seven distinct glass vessels: a bottle with an octopus whose tentacle pours down the center, a sealed flask containing a tied scroll, an overturned cup trapping a small spider, a dome with a miniature city inside, a bell jar terrarium with mushrooms and a tiny house, a round fishbowl with a solitary goldfish, and a ship frozen inside a bottle at the bottom. The background shows fine crosshatching and a small spider web in the corner of one compartment. The card is bordered by a cream frame and marked with the Roman numeral VII at the bottom.
Fifth Spirit tarot
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