The Five of Cups opens the Scorpio decans in the water suit's zodiacal sequence, Mars ruling the first ten degrees before the Sun takes the Six of Cups at Scorpio's middle decan and Venus the Seven at its third, the three cards together working through the sign the Golden Dawn associates with loss, transformation and buried feeling more consistently than any other in the wheel.
Pamela Colman Smith's picture, a cloaked figure in black mourning over three spilled cups while two full ones stand upright behind him unseen, a bridge and a house visible in the distance, has no equivalent in the Tarot de Marseille, whose Cinq de Coupes is five plain cups in a lattice, read by cartomancers from number and suit alone rather than from any scene of selective grief. The figure's back is turned to what remains standing, a compositional choice commentators consistently read as the entire point of the card, framed as a study in attention rather than in loss as such.
The Golden Dawn title, Loss in Pleasure, and Crowley's blunter Disappointment for the Thoth deck both keep Mars's harder edge, disappointment as active wound rather than passive absence; Harris renders the five cups as an angular, spilled geometric pattern under a Martian glyph, dropping the mourning figure and the two cups still standing along with him, so the Thoth card carries none of Smith's crucial detail about what the grieving figure has not yet turned to see.