General Book of the Tarot: Cups: Knight of Cups

---

Knight of Cups

TRADITION: "The higher graces of the imagination" (W.). Arrival, approach, advances, proposition, demeanour, invitation, incitement, reception, comparison. Reversed: Trickery, fraud, duplicity, subtlety, swindle, artifice.

THEORY: The Water of the soul on the Twelfth and on the Eighth house. The double influence of water makes the emotions and feelings prominent, relates to the imagination, to deeper experiences and strong reactions of the soul, processes of psychic life, which may end in wonderful success or in less desirable phenomena. It is sure to indicate much relating to the subways of human life and the human soul. This is not always favourable or pleasant, of course, but is in almost every instance intensive, though the cups never go to anything like hatred or crime or real malice. Their weakness is in being unreliable or incalculable with regard to things of the exact world or matter. So in the worst cases this card may indicate everything connected with swindling from sheer mental instability. But it may also be, that the term 'swindler' (charlatan) is wrongly given to people who are standing apart from the common herd and are more or less occultists. The "higher graces of the imagination."

There may be certainly a considerable degree of