Five of Cups

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.

Upright the Five of Cups is read as grief, regret and disappointment fixed on what has been lost; reversed, as acceptance, forgiveness, and the turn toward what still remains.

Cartomancers working the suit before Smith's picture existed read a bare five of cups, like any suit's five, as disruption breaking a settled four, an unhappiness in matters of the heart without her specific staging of two cups left unseen; it is the picture, not the older number-based tradition or the Golden Dawn's Mars-in-Scorpio placement, that supplies the reminder built into the card that something remains, since neither the bare number nor the occult title requires any hopeful remainder at all.

Waite's own printed meaning for the reversed card, a return, a renewal, an alliance restored after a quarrel, is somewhat more concrete and relational than the general acceptance most contemporary readers now describe, another instance of the deck's twentieth-century drift toward reading feeling states rather than events.

Because the figure's back is turned rather than his eyes closed, careful readers commonly treat the card less as a claim that recovery is impossible than as a description of where attention currently sits, which makes the reversed meaning read less as an external rescue than as the same figure finally choosing to turn around.