The Open Athenaeum

✶ The Study Deck

Knight of Cups

Cups, of the lesser arcana

Waite & Colman Smith, 1909 · described 1911

Graceful, but not warlike; riding quietly, wearing a winged helmet, referring to those higher graces of the imagination which sometimes characterize this card. He too is a dreamer, but the images of the side of sense haunt him in his vision.

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

In divination

Arrival, approach—sometimes that of a messenger; advances, proposition, demeanour, invitation, incitement.

Reversed: Trickery, artifice, subtlety, swindling, duplicity, fraud.

The library's note

Graceful rather than warlike, the Knight rides quietly in a winged helmet, and Waite calls him, like the Page below him, "a dreamer," though one haunted by the images of sense rather than merely picturing them. He carries cups' feeling forward as approach, "arrival," "advances, proposition, invitation," courtship rather than conquest, a notably gentler errand than any of the other three suits give their mounted rank.

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/pktcukn.htm

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