The Open Athenaeum

✶ The Study Deck

Page of Cups

Cups, of the lesser arcana

Waite & Colman Smith, 1909 · described 1911

A fair, pleasing, somewhat effeminate page, of studious and intent aspect, contemplates a fish rising from a cup to look at him. It is the pictures of the mind taking form.

the plate, in waite's words · the painted card will hang here in time

In divination

Fair young man, one impelled to render service and with whom the Querent will be connected; a studious youth; news, message; application, reflection, meditation; also these things directed to business.

Reversed: Taste, inclination, attachment, seduction, deception, artifice.

The library's note

A studious page watches a fish rise from his cup to look back at him, an image Waite reads as thought becoming visible, "the pictures of the mind taking form." He is called fair and "somewhat effeminate" in Waite's own words, the suit's feeling carried here as reflection rather than action, a message not yet acted upon. Where the wands' Page announced strange news outright, cups' Page simply watches his own imagination surface and take shape before him.

a young page · the keeper's voice pass on the note is still to come

Doors Onward

Sources & Further Reading

  1. Waite, A. E. (1911). The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. Card text quoted verbatim, his punctuation kept. (Public domain.)
  2. Card described at: http://sacred-texts.com/tarot/pkt/pktcupa.htm

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