Queen of Cups upright
The Queen of Cups shows a sensitive, romantic, dreamy and contemplative person with great emotional depth. You are imaginative, poetic and kind, with an agreeable character and a dreamy core. You judge things through your emotional reactions and your personal values. You perceive nuances and what is going on beneath the surface, and you are deeply affected by moods and feelings, your own and other people's. People come to you for an intuitive opinion, and you understand people through your intuition and empathy. You take in what comes from others easily: you pick up their projections and send back to them what they carry without knowing it. You are strongly marked by the influences around you, and so you are more dependent than others on what surrounds you. You are receptive and you want to please, which makes it hard to know yourself: you take the shape of whatever offers you comfort and security. Some see concealment in that. Or else you protect your sensitivity by becoming reserved and self-contained. You follow an inner rhythm rather than the clock.
You prefer a setting of peace and harmony, but you also live comfortably in fantasy and imagination. You sometimes have a fascination with mysticism. People may find you seductive, charming and fascinating. You like to attract and lead others, and you are often very much liked. You are also the family figure: your goals include emotional goals, family ones in particular, and love gives meaning to what you do.
Your strengths
You are sensitive, graceful, loving and caring. You have a taste for poetry, beauty and the arts, and a great aesthetic finesse. You are honest, devoted, ready to be of service, with intelligence in love and a gift of vision. You are also virtuous, warm, respectable, modest and upright. Your imagination can turn into lasting work when it meets a real will and a real value. You can draw success, happiness and pleasure from it.
What holds you back
- You can be self-centered in your pleasures, scattered, not well anchored in the concrete.
- You are shy, sentimental, credulous and capricious.
- Your imagination is stronger than your feeling, and you live in your dreams.
- You find it hard to know yourself, because you take the shape of what reassures you.
- You depend on what influences you, and everything that passes through you can be distorted when you are not well.
- Your great capacity for reception can leave you without a character of your own, at the mercy of impressions.
What helps
Channeling your imagination into an activity that has value rather than letting it wander. Keeping love as what gives meaning to your actions. Being prudent and giving good advice. Making room for your inner rhythm and your need for peace.
Love
You want to be cherished, pampered and adored. You may dream of the person you love or flirt. It announces a perfect wife.
Family
As a mother and partner, you see no wrong in your loved ones and you create a beautiful, artistic setting for them.
Home
You create an artistic, beautiful environment around you.
Queen of Cups reversed
Upright, the Queen of Cups is sensitive, dreamy and very attentive to her emotions. You may deny your emotions, or come across as listless and without strength. You may also refuse to give in to games of pretense and reject beliefs that are not your own.
At one extreme, you may take refuge in unrealistic fantasy and self-pity. At the other, you are sharp and capable, you let no one take advantage of you, you see through illusions and you refuse to be swept away by your feelings. You may seem almost unreal, too ethereal. You may also hide your love. On the inner level, you may have a deep bond with the sacred, to the point of cutting yourself off from your senses.
You may be ambitious and powerful, but you cannot be trusted: love has been lost, and with it the attachment to values larger than your own success. If you drift further from balance, you can lose all uprightness, because your creative force slips away from you. The advice you give keeps its quality, but people may not listen to it.
Your strengths
You know how to resist pretense and refuse beliefs that are not your own. You can have a deep devotion to the sacred.
What holds you back
- You deny your emotions, or you find yourself listless.
- You take refuge in unrealistic fantasy and self-pity.
- You are impractical, very sensitive to criticism, and you forget time constraints and regulations.
- You can be frivolous and inconstant.
- To get what you want, you may use sulking, passive resistance or seduction.
- Your emotional insecurity can make you jealous, envious, bitter and at times spiteful in rivalry, or clingy and attached to others.
- You can pull away from others and become hard, cold and unfeeling.
- You can hide your love.
- You aim at success without taking love into account any more, and you lose other people's trust.
What helps
Connecting what you feel to what you do: knowing what you want, taking the steps to get it, while keeping love present in your actions. Refusing beliefs that are not your own.
Love
You can be seductive and at the same time refuse what the other expects of you. Insecurity makes you jealous or clingy, or the reverse, hard and cold. You can hide your love.
Family
As a mother or partner, you can withdraw into yourself, hold resentment and think of yourself first. You can blame others for your unhappiness. You can smother those close to you with your emotional need and dependence.
Creativity
Your creative force is no longer connected to action and can slip away from you.
What the card shows
In the image, a very beautiful fair-haired woman, crowned, sits on a throne. Water flows beneath the throne, with lotuses growing in it. In one hand she holds a cup from which a crayfish emerges. An ibis with open wings decorates her crown, her breastplate and her boots, and a second ibis stands beside her, her hand resting on it. In that hand she also holds a lotus. Her face is dreamy.
The throne rests on calm water, which reflects the Queen's image almost undisturbed. This water tells you the nature of the card: the Queen represents the most watery part of the element Water, its capacity to receive and to reflect. She is dressed and veiled in endless curves of light. Her cup is shaped like a seashell, from which the crayfish emerges. The lotus she carries is that of Isis, the Great Mother.
Her image has extreme purity and beauty, with infinite subtlety. It is almost impossible to see the truth about her, because she reflects the nature of whoever looks at her with great fidelity. Since water is a mirror, whoever looks at her sees only themselves. That is why she is popular and makes friends easily. The large cup whose stem is the body of a goddess brings her close to the High Priestess: the High Priestess is the cup of the virgin goddess of the Moon, the Queen of Cups that of the great mother goddess.
She is associated with the end of Gemini and the beginning of Cancer.
The character traits attributed to her are dreaminess, illusion and tranquility. She is imaginative, poetic and kind, with a coquettish, good-natured side beneath a dreamy appearance. In her, imagination is stronger than feeling. She is strongly marked by outside influences, and so depends more than most court cards on how she behaves. If she behaves badly, she becomes dangerous and cruel, because she distorts the reflections she gives back.
You are sensitive, romantic, dreamy and contemplative, with great emotional depth. You have a refined taste for poetry, beauty and the arts. You judge things through your emotional reactions and your personal values. You sense nuances and what lies beneath the surface, and you are deeply affected by moods, your own and other people's. People come to you for intuition, and you may rely on your empathy to understand them. You follow an inner rhythm rather than the clock. You prefer a setting of peace and harmony, but you also live very comfortably in fantasy and imagination. Sometimes you are drawn to mysticism. Others may find you glamorous, seductive, enchanting.
Your strengths
You are imaginative, poetic and kind. You are loving, graceful and caring, with a great aesthetic sense. You take in what others are going through without being overwhelmed by it, and you know how to reflect it back to them. Your intuition helps others. You easily draw sympathy.
What holds you back
- You take little trouble for others.
- You are sometimes self-indulgent, impractical, scattered and cut off from the concrete world.
- You let yourself be influenced and may believe what you are told too quickly.
- You take on other people's projections to please them.
- You find it hard to know yourself, because you take the shape of whatever reassures and protects you, and some people see concealment in that.
- Your imagination comes before your feeling.
What helps
- Protecting yourself by being reserved and self-sufficient when your sensitivity is overtaxed.
- Directing your imagination toward a useful activity rather than letting it wander.
- Drawing on what you have already achieved to feed what you do next.
Love
In a relationship, you want to be cherished, pampered and adored. You may flirt with the person you love or dream about them.
Family
As a mother and as a partner, you see no fault in those close to you, and you create an artistic, beautiful setting for them.
Creativity
The Queen's cup is the most elaborate of all, and it stands for what the imagination can accomplish. She fixes her gaze on this cup with intensity, which shows a will that guides the creative impulse without smothering it.
