Seven of Cups upright
The Seven of Cups speaks of your imagination, your daydreams and your desires. You are in an area where it is getting harder and harder to tell fantasy from illusion and to make clear choices. Seven is the number of trials: this card tests your ability to see through mistaken perceptions. You may be working with your creative imagination, or letting yourself go into excess and the pleasures of the senses. You may also be confused and tormented by indecision, or on the contrary imagining exciting possibilities and mentally rehearsing plans to bring them about.
The visions on this card cover the whole range of fantasies: wealth, victory, fear, adventure, and figures from mythology. Your daydreams are not worthless: they often come from deep needs. What they lack is a link with action and with outer reality. Without that link, they remain daydreams with no meaning or value. Emotion and imagination produce beautiful visions, but they are not enough alone.
The card announces an illusory success. At the start, a victory is possible, but it is neutralized by your passivity, and the success you get is not followed up or kept. The joys are passing, and you take for lasting what is not. The card also speaks of a happiness of the mind, which seeks to rise above matter, and of disappointments. This card corresponds to Venus in Scorpio, a place where Venus is ill at ease. It shows an imbalance: it is the lowest and least stable of the sevens, and entering it through a frantic struggle is risky. When you lose contact with what is greater than you and drift from your balance, what was sacred becomes a shameful secret and a bad conscience. On the card, the cups are empty: no water falls from the flowers. It is the image of a pleasure in excess, which no longer brings you anything.
Your strengths
- You are able to dream, reflect, meditate, and form thoughts and plans.
- You can imagine exciting possibilities and mentally rehearse plans to reach them.
- Your daydreams come from deep needs.
What holds you back
- You find it hard to tell fantasy from illusion and to make clear choices.
- You are confused and hesitate for a long time.
- You let your visions captivate you, you shut yourself into daydreams and your energy scatters.
- You are tempted by projects that promise quick riches and by instant success.
- You have unrealistic attitudes and whims.
- You can give in to excess: vanity, anger, sensual pleasures, selfish dissipation.
- You can deceive yourself or be deceived: lies, errors, broken promises.
- You get an initial success but you do not follow it up.
- Your passivity neutralizes a victory that was in fact possible.
- You take passing joys for lasting achievements, and you are disappointed.
- Your daydreams are attached to nothing outside themselves.
What helps
- Linking your daydreams to action and to outer reality.
- Taking your daydreams seriously instead of thinking them worthless: they come from deep needs.
- Checking what is real in what you perceive, to see through errors of perception.
- Looking for ways to make these dreams concrete: the other cards in the spread show how.
- Keeping your balance and your contact with what is greater than you.
Seven of Cups reversed
The upright Seven of Cups speaks of daydreams, visions and imagination. It becomes hard to tell fantasy from illusion and to make clear choices. Reversed, it changes direction: it brings forward clear, logical thinking, realistic plans and priorities. It rather points to good things for reaching what you aim at. The words associated with it are plan, project, desire, will, intention, determination, resolve, wise choice, goal almost reached.
You may be coming out of a fog of confusion and illusion to focus on a chosen goal. With firm intention, you set your objectives and find solutions. What tempted you before attracts you less, and you set aside a short-lived pleasure for a bigger reward. The other cards in the spread say whether this is for a spiritual goal or for something else.
In another situation, you resist a temptation or hold back your desire by willpower, to the point of giving up sensual pleasures. You can also set against each fault its opposite quality: humility against pride, kindness against envy, temperance against gluttony, chastity against lust, patience against anger, generosity against greed, diligence against sloth.
If you are creative, you have a well-designed project, but it still lacks the imagination and soul that give the upright card its life. If you project this card onto someone else, you see them as a rationalist, unable to appreciate the part played by imagination and wonder, or unable to see what is false in their own foundations.
Your strengths
You think clearly and make realistic plans. You have resolve and willpower. You know how to give up an immediate pleasure for a bigger objective.
What holds you back
- Your confusion can grow to the point of making you lose touch with reality.
- You suppress or redirect your desires, and the struggle against temptation takes a lot out of you.
- You may spend too much time in the world of imagination.
- You may stay in the rational and lack imagination.
- A hope can be shattered.
What helps
Setting priorities and concentrating on a chosen goal. Dissolving illusions to see the reality beneath. Facing the temptations of the world, the ones that have brought down so many gurus and leaders. Read the other cards in the spread to see where your will is heading.
What the card shows
The Seven of Cups belongs to the water suit, the suit of dreams, daydreams and visions. The further you go through the Cups, the harder it becomes to tell fantasy from illusion and to make clear choices.
On the Waite-Smith tarot card, apparitions rise out of the seven cups. They may stand for the seven deadly sins, which keep you from moving forward spiritually, or for the visions of a mystic or an artist. The objects coming out of the cups stand for what people want and think they deserve: a fine house (the castle), honor (the laurel wreath) and money (the jewels). A veiled figure, under a white cloth, is hidden, and a snake and a dragon accompany the scene. Seven is the number of trials: the card can be an inner struggle that tests your ability to see through mistaken perceptions. The image also resembles a pyramid scheme: you may be tempted by get-rich-quick plans, hoping for instant success.
Upright meanings: thoughts and projects, fantasy, imagination, feeling, meditation, daydreaming, opinions, unrealistic attitudes, whims, illusory success. You may work with the symbolism of the creative imagination and the soul, or give in to debauchery and sensual pleasures. You may also imagine exciting possibilities and rehearse plans in your mind to make them happen. The card announces lies, broken promises, illusion, deception, error, and an initial success that does not last. In the Tarot de Marseille, it speaks of pleasure, passing joys, achievements believed to be lasting that are not, and disappointments.
Your strengths
You can imagine exciting possibilities and prepare in your mind the plans to reach them.
What holds you back
- You confuse fantasy with illusion, and you find it hard to make clear choices.
- You let yourself be fascinated by your visions, you linger on them and your energy scatters.
- You build castles in the air or stay stuck in indecision.
- You are tempted by get-rich-quick plans and expect immediate success.
- You win an early success and do not follow it up.
- You give in to excess and easy pleasures.
What helps
- Looking, with other cards or other means, for ways to make your dreams concrete.
- Thinking clearly and logically, making realistic plans and setting priorities.
- Coming out of the fog of illusion to focus on a chosen goal, with determination.
- Setting opposite virtues against the excesses: humility, kindness, sobriety, patience, generosity, diligence.
- Preferring a greater reward to passing pleasures.
