🃏 Tarot Card Meaning
The Six of Cups shows a child handing a cup of flowers to a smaller child in an old courtyard — sweetness reaching across time. The past visits kindly here: a reunion, a memory that suddenly perfumes an ordinary day, a return to a place or practice that once made you innocent-happy. The card also honors what childhood planted — gifts and loyalties that still bloom in the adult.
Practically, the Six invites deliberate revisiting: call the old friend, cook the grandmother's recipe, take the younger person under your wing as someone once took you. The past is a garden to draw cuttings from.
What did you love before the world told you what to love — and where is it now?
Reversed, the Six of Cups holds the visitor too long. Nostalgia becomes residence: the golden era endlessly rescreened while the present goes unwatered, or an old relationship reconsidered mainly because memory has quietly deleted its worst scenes. Sometimes the past pulls harder because business there is unfinished — a childhood wound that keeps redirecting adult mail.
The reversal asks you to visit the past honestly and return on schedule. Keep the gifts, complete the grieving, and notice when remembering has become avoiding.
Which cherished memory would look different if you watched the unedited version?
Card imagery: Rider-Waite-Smith deck (1909), public domain.
A main reason why events are so rarely foretold by Astrologers, is because the Art is yet but imperfectly discovered, for hitherto those that have been most excellent in it, being commonly old persons, have despaired to live to see the fortunes of children newly-born, and the Nativities of persons grown up, being uncertain, they scarce thought them worth so much labour. - Cardan Girolamo (1501-1576)