Six of Cups

What the card means

Upright

Something kind arrives out of the past, and arrives with no conditions on it: an old friend, a forgotten skill, a place where you are still remembered. The card is about innocence - not the naive sort, but the sort in which nobody is yet keeping count of who owes what. Often it is literal: a letter, a meeting, an object that has been in a drawer for years.

Reversed

The past has been rewritten in its own favour and is getting in the way of the present. There is nowhere to go back to: that place is gone and what remains is the memory of it. Sometimes it is a person holding on to who they were instead of who they became.

Love and relationships

Upright

A relationship without arithmetic - the kind where nobody is keeping score. An old attachment may come back, and come back peacefully. For a couple the card recalls how it started, and that helps more than another conversation about what is wrong.

Reversed

Comparison with people who came before, in which the present always loses - because it is not competing with a person but with an edited memory. Or a relationship held together by a shared past and by nothing else.

Work and business

Upright

What helps is what you already know how to do, and the people you have already worked with. A return to an old project, an earlier trade, somebody who once asked you in. Nothing needs inventing.

Reversed

Holding on to a method that used to work and has stopped. Or to a place you outgrew long ago, because it is familiar and they know your name there.

Money

Upright

Money from a familiar source: a debt repaid, help from family, a gift. The amounts are small, but they arrive easily and with nothing attached.

Reversed

Waiting for help from somewhere it is not coming from any more. Or paying for something that recalls the past rather than being needed now.

The card's advice

Ask the people who knew you earlier. Take what is offered without working out what it will have to be paid back with - here it genuinely will not. And check whether you remember the place better than it was.

As the card of the day

A day on which the past speaks up: somebody writes, an old photograph turns up, something you thought was gone comes back. A gentle day that asks nothing. Good for meeting people, bad for large decisions.

What is depicted

A boy hands a girl a cup with flowers in it; five more stand around them, all in bloom. The courtyard is old and a guard is walking away round the corner - nobody is watching, and nobody wants anything. The gesture is simple and there is no condition in it.

Zodiac sign and correspondences

Sun in Scorpio - warmth that comes from underneath rather than from above.

With other cards

• Six of Cups + Three of Cups — people who have not seen each other in a long time; the occasion will find itself.
• Six of Cups + Ten of Pentacles — house and family - a past that is not only remembered but kept up.
• Six of Cups + Eight of Swords — a memory that holds you: nobody leaves it, because it is warmer inside.