Nine of Cups

The picture

A man in a red cap sits on a low wooden bench with his arms folded and his legs apart, smiling. Behind him a curved counter draped in blue cloth carries nine cups, set out in an arc at head height.

He is looking straight out of the card. Almost nobody else in this suit is — the figures in the Five, the Eight and the Ten all have their backs turned — and this one is facing the viewer directly and looking pleased.

The drape hides everything under the counter.

Upright

Satisfaction, set out where it can be seen.

The Nine of Cups is generally called the wish card, and it is, but the nickname loses the arrangement. The cups are on a shelf, in order, facing outward. Nothing is being drunk from and nothing is being handed to anyone.

This is contentment that has taken on a faint edge of display: earned, real, and now being looked at. The folded arms are not hostile. They are the posture of somebody standing in front of a thing they would rather nobody rearranged.

The counter has a skirt

The blue cloth is worth a moment. It runs the full length of the counter, floor to top, and it means that what holds the nine cups up cannot be seen.

Every cup is visible. None of the structure is. That is an accurate picture of how this kind of satisfaction gets presented — the results at eye level, arranged, and the arrangements underneath them out of view and nobody's business.

There is no suggestion that anything is hidden in a discreditable sense. The point is subtler and more common: the display is the part that is finished, and it is the only part that has been made available for looking at.

Count the cups again and note where they are not. None is in his hands. In a suit where cups are constantly being offered, drunk from, poured out and carried across fields, this figure is the only person sitting with his arms folded in front of nine of them.

Reversed

The wish granted and thin. Getting the thing and discovering that the wanting had been doing more work than the thing ever could, which is a quiet disappointment and difficult to complain about.

Satisfaction can also come to require an audience before it registers. Pleasure that does not quite count until somebody else has seen it, with the counter getting longer and the arms staying folded.

In a reading

Good news in an outcome position, with a small question attached about what happens the following week. As advice, enjoy it and stop guarding it — the guarding is the part that turns into the reversed card.

The older tradition read this figure as smug, and the moralising is imported. There is nothing wrong with being pleased about something. With the Ten the difference is who else is in the room; with the Four, the same cups go entirely unnoticed.