This spiraling five-card layout shows the present situation as it enters the future. The first card is the significator, meaning the overall theme and mood of the question posed. The significator is compounded by the next two cards, showing the current problem and a clue to what might offer a helping hand to overcome this problem. The fourth and fifth cards show the near future, leading into the long-term outcome.
Positive Influences 6 of Cups |
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Obstacle Judgement |
Long Term Results 6 of Wands |
What's coming soon 7 of Cups |
The Situation 2 of Cups |
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The Situation
A youth and maiden are pledging the love of one another, and above their cups rises the Caduceus of Hermes, between the great wings of which there appears a lion's head. It is a variant of a sign which is found in a few old examples of this card.
Upright Meaning:
Love, passion, friendship, affinity, union, concord, sympathy, the interrelation of the sexes, and – as a suggestion apart from all offices of divination – that desire which Nature is sanctified.
An angel in the heavens blows a trumpet, calling the dead to rise from their graves.
Reversed Meaning:
Weakness, simplicity, deliberation, decision, sentence, lawsuit, loss, condemnation.
Children in an old garden, their cups filled with flowers.
Upright Meaning:
Remembrances, looking back, as on childhood; happiness, enjoyment, but coming rather from the past; things that have vanished. Another reading reverses this, giving new relations, new knowledge, new environment, and then the children are disporting in an unfamiliar precinct.
Strange chalices of vision, but the images are more especially those of the fantastic spirit.
Reversed Meaning:
Desire, will, determination, project, ambition.
A laurelled horseman bears one staff adorned with a laurel crown; footmen with staves are at his side.
Reversed Meaning:
Apprehension, fear, as of a victorious enemy at the gate; treachery, disloyalty, gates being opened to the enemy, indefinite delay.