Six of Cups Tarot Card Meaning

Six of Cups upright

The Six of Cups shows a situation of well-being, harmony and satisfaction that settles in without effort or tension. It is one of the best cards in the deck, a card of fertility. The pleasure it speaks of is a deep well-being, that of a life unfolding in agreement with itself. After the difficult cards of the Cups series, balance returns: the Six is a strong and noble number, the first to regain the balance of the Ace. The image shows cups that are filling, but are not yet full.

This card speaks a great deal about the past and childhood. It indicates that what you lived through earlier influences your present situation. You may feel nostalgic for a simpler and happier time, think back on your youth and childhood, or miss ways of living from the past. After a hardship, you may look for comfort in your memories or welcome your friends' support in the present. The image shows a little girl in a garden being offered a gift by a taller person: it speaks of protection and security, that of a child whose parents take care of every need. The Six is also a balanced exchange: you give and receive tenderness, attention and affectionate gestures.

Your strengths

You know how to give and receive affection: tender gestures, gifts, attention to others.
You are sensitive to sensual pleasure and well-being.
You have support around you: friends who comfort you and people who appreciate you.
You make your surroundings more beautiful, often with a taste for the style of the past.
You feel at ease and in balance when things follow their natural course, without forcing.

What holds you back

You turn toward the past and idealize former times.
You stay attached to old loves and old memories.
You hesitate in love and sometimes make bad choices.
You may feel a lack of affection or dissatisfaction.
Difficulties from childhood may still weigh on your situation.
Staying in a protected setting spares you from making your own choices, and you may keep being treated as a child because that security reassures you.

What helps

Accepting the support of your loved ones and friends.
Offering affectionate attention and gestures, and receiving them.
Making up after an argument when you have the chance.
Making your surroundings beautiful and pleasant.

Love

You may court someone, make up after a quarrel, make romantic gestures full of kindness or think back on old loves. New encounters are possible; so is hesitation in love.

Children

Childhood, innocence and protection are at the center of the card.

Home

You make your home more beautiful, with a taste for old-style decor.

Six of Cups reversed

The reversed Six of Cups speaks of your relationship to the past. You may be turning away from your past toward the future, with more or less success. Either way, you find it hard to live fully in the present.

This card can also show that you are still attached to what was, and that this attachment makes you slow and inert. If you go back to a place from your past, you may find that nothing is as you remember: idealized memories fall apart in the face of reality.

It can also say that you are undoing old emotional ties and the unconscious habits that go with them, and freeing yourself from old obligations and responsibilities. It can concern work on your inner child, and it also says it is time to grow up, live in the present and perhaps leave your childhood home or family stories, literally or figuratively. If you are ashamed of your origins, moving beyond your roots can fuel your ambition for the future.

It can say that you have ended a sheltered and confined life in which others decided for you. You may have let your parents treat you as a child because of the security that gave you. Even if your parents struggle to accept that you have grown up, you must make your own decisions and take your own risks. This change can also be hard for you to accept.

Among the traditional meanings of the reversed card are the future and prospects ahead, the promise of better times, regeneration and renewal, new friends or a new setting, and projects that may fail. Rarely, it indicates that you find a past love again.

When you project this card onto others, you may see them as reactionaries, as people turned to an extreme toward progress, or as people who refuse to grow up.

Your strengths

You can free yourself from old emotional patterns and former obligations.
You can turn toward the future, including new fields such as new technologies or science fiction.
You can be reborn and renew yourself.

What holds you back

You stay attached to the past, which can make you slow and inert.
You idealize memories that do not survive reality.
You find it hard to live in the present.
You may find it hard to admit that you no longer have the protection you once had and that you must decide on your own.

What helps

Loosening the old emotional ties and the unconscious habits attached to them.
Accepting to grow up and live in the present.
Making your own decisions and taking your own risks.
Rearranging your living space to move away from your memories.

What the card shows

In the classic image, children are in an old garden and their cups are filled with flowers. A small figure offers a cup to a child: the first stands for the past, the second for the future, and the gift is one of memories. The guardian, the enclosed courtyard and the difference in size between the figures can also be read as protection or as intrigue. This image shows a relationship of giving and receiving: a person who protects or teaches brings wisdom and security to a relative, a pupil or a friend. Six is also the high point of each suit and stands for reciprocity, here an exchange of emotions.

The Six comes after the loss of the Five: you look for comfort in the past or you accept your friends' support in the present. Cups speak of emotions and dreams, and here they speak of sweet memories. Sometimes these memories are true to the past. Sometimes you idealize that past and see it as a safe time, when you were protected and given everything you needed. The old meaning of the card is the past, memory, nostalgia, what has gone, and a happiness that comes mostly from what has been lived, such as childhood. In another reading, the card announces new relationships, new knowledge and a new circle, and the children are then playing in a place they do not know.

In the old occult tarot, six lotus flowers each lean over a cup, and clear water flows from the flowers into the cups as from a fountain. The cups are not yet full. This card is named Pleasure and corresponds to the Sun in Scorpio. Six is the number of the Sun, which strengthens the influence of the number here: the card shows the action of the Sun on water. Its power is strong but balanced, and it feeds what makes things fertile and alive. It is one of the best cards in the deck, a card of fertility. This card directly mirrors the Ace of Cups: balance returns to the suit after the Four and the Five, which are like bad dreams.

The pleasure of this card means well-being, the harmony of natural forces without effort or tension, ease and satisfaction. It is pleasure fully in harmony with oneself. The card also stands for the fulfillment of sexual desire. Its promise is the beginning of a wish coming true, of happiness, success or joy. It is the beginning of a steady increase in gain and pleasure: a beginning only. You may find in it sensual pleasure, happiness, or the attention and recognition of others.

Your strengths

Your happy memories give you a warm sense of security that helps you face your current problems. You offer tender gestures and gifts. You can make your surroundings more beautiful, especially in an old-fashioned style.

What holds you back

You cling to the past, and it pulls you away from the present as much as fantasies about the future do.
You idealize your childhood and see it as safer than it was.
You long for simpler, happier times.
You are sometimes ungrateful or presumptuous.
You get into quarrels and conflicts out of excessive self-assertion and vanity.
Your nostalgia can breed lethargy and inertia.
Rarely, the image is used to say that a painful side of childhood is denied or forgotten behind fond family memories.

What helps

Making the past a gift for the future. When the card is reversed, it turns your gaze toward the future rather than the past, and toward renewal, projects and new friendships. It can then help you release old emotional ties and their unconscious habits, free yourself from old obligations and live in the present. If you go back to a place from your past, it may have changed, and idealized memories come apart when they meet reality. Reversed, the card can also show troubled memories, a sense of distance from the past, or the end of a relationship in which one person protects or teaches the other.

Love

You may court someone, make up after an argument or think back on past loves. There may also be hesitations in love and a lack of affection. The card fulfills romantic and sexual desire.