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In an old village, an older child offers a younger one a cup of flowers, five more flower-filled cups around them.
Rider–Waite–Smith, 1909 · public domain

Minor Arcana · Cups

Six of Cups

After a loss, you think back to when life felt simpler, and the memory comforts you. It's sweeter than those days were. Go back as often as you need to, but you can't live there.

Rank
Six — Harmony
Suit
Cups — water, emotion
Reads as
Emotional balance restored, often by looking backward.
  • Nostalgia
  • Childhood
  • Happiness
  • Innocence
  • Giving

Updated October 2026·Little Grimoire card reference

What Six of Cups means

Memory moves like the cup here, from older to younger. Teach your niece the card game your grandfather taught you, and what you remember becomes hers.

Sometimes the past comes back in person. Someone who knew you as a child remembers things you've forgotten, and can hand some of them back. One old reading turns the scene around: the children are playing somewhere unfamiliar, and the card means new people and new surroundings.

When you'd see this

Your phone shows you old college photos, and you miss how simple those years felt.

Back on your childhood street, you smile at how small the houses look now.

Clearing out a closet, you find a box of an old friend's letters and lose the afternoon to them.

What's in the picture

  1. 1

    A cup of flowers, older to youngerA taller figure hands a cup of white flowers to a smaller one: giving from innocence, generous and simple. The emotional currency is sweetness and care.

  2. 2

    Six cups filled with flowersSix cups, each filled with flowers: not water, not wine, but flowers. These are memories, tended and preserved. The past has been made beautiful, not bitter.

  3. 3

    The old village or garden settingThe scene sits in what looks like a childhood home: an old village, a garden, a place from the past. Not the present. A return to somewhere you once belonged.

  4. 4

    The older and younger figuresThe two could be two children, or your present self and past self. The older gives to the younger: comfort or recognition for the part of you that remembers.

Reversed

Four ways to read this card reversed. Which one depends on the question.

Blocked. A memory you keep reaching for and can't get back to.

Internal. The old garden is still there and it's yours alone.

Excess. So much of the past in the room that the present can't get a chair.

Shadow. Memory as a place to hide from the present.

Where it sits in the suit

The Suit of Cups, ace to king

  1. A
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. Page
  12. Knight
  13. Queen
  14. King

Ten numbered beats, then four people who carry them.

Children turn up once more in Cups, at the Ten, dancing beside a couple with their arms raised. Here childhood is remembered, but at the Ten it's happening now, in a home of its own.

Reading a card is a skill, not a lookup

Every Cups card here is taught in full in Chapter III of Little Grimoire, with drills that make the meanings stick.

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