Cups

Cups is one of the four suits of the Minor Arcana, the fifty-six numbered and court cards that make up the larger part of a tarot deck. In the elemental scheme of the Western esoteric tradition the suit is attributed to the element of Water, and its cards concern emotion, love, relationships and the inner life; feeling, intuition and the bonds between people.

The suit and its element

The tarot began in fifteenth-century Italy as a card game, its four suits matching those of ordinary Italian playing cards. The elemental correspondences read here, Wands to Fire, Cups to Water, Swords to Air, Coins to Earth, were formalised much later, chiefly by French occultists of the nineteenth century and by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn from 1888, who wove the suits into a wider system of magic and astrology.

The suit is described here within that documented interpretive tradition; the elemental attribution is a convention of Western occultism rather than a feature of the game from which the cards descend.

The four suits of the tarot came to Europe on ordinary playing cards before any pack carried trumps, and their history is the history of card playing rather than of divination.

An unchanged suit

A surviving Mamluk pack held in the Topkapi Palace collection in Istanbul carries four suits: cups, coins, swords and polo-sticks. Cups passed into the European Latin suits unchanged, as coins did. Both are objects that needed no reinterpretation by the copyists who brought the pattern west.

The suit is coppe in Italian packs, copas in Spanish ones, and coupes in the French Latin-suited packs, all of them the plain word for a drinking vessel.

What became of it in the French suits

When the French suit signs were devised in the later fifteenth century, they were simplified shapes that a stencil could print. The cup became the heart, and the descent is visible in the correspondence tables that cartomancers have used ever since: hearts to cups, tiles to coins, clovers to batons, pikes to swords.

Water

The assignment of this suit to the element Water is one of the more stable parts of the occult correspondence scheme, agreed across systems that disagree sharply about Wands and Swords. Stability is not antiquity, though. The elemental attributions were attached to the suits from the eighteenth century onward and formed no part of the pack as it was played with for the first four hundred years of its European life.

Sources The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake CityMichael Dummett with A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult TarotRonald Decker, Thierry Depaulis and Michael Dummett