Five of Cups - Upright

Minor Arcana

This signifies loss and regret about something done in the past. You need to forget the past and make a new beginning. Relationships may be unsatisfactory. There may be some kind of sorrow or remorse in your life. You need to accept things as they are and move on.



Let's hear your interpretation of the card...

This person is missing someone or something very bad. He had five cups, three of which are now spilled. He needs to save what he has left. He has to look to the future. What’s done is done.

Not being able to move on.

Making the most of what still remains.

Making a move to recover.

he is still thinking about his bad fortune and feels he cant save the unspilt 2 cups anymore...the battle is lost.

Turn your back on the past and what was lost, turn around and look ahead to the future and new opportunities.
also, three have been lost, but two remain

Three represents the party that is over. Two represents the love he still has within him or for someone else. 3 + 2 = 5 .

Quote: "No use crying over spilt milk"

Literary reference: "Fear no more the heat o'the sun - nor the furious winter's raging..." This is the dirge written for Imogen's funeral in Shakespeare's Cymbeline. I love this song/poem - because Imogen is in fact not dead, so although the others are mourning what they fear they have lost for ever, they are pleasantly surprised when she wakes up.

This and the 9 of Swords for me represent my depression, which in reality turned out to be fear, lack, and negative thoughts counteracting any possibility of moving forward. As in metaphysics, the first thing is to concentrate on what you still have and increase that, rather than turn one's thoughts to the things you miss. While I was depressed I was constantly looking back at what I'd lost - I visualised it as a door slamming shut, leaving me in the dark and not allowing me to go back to the times when I was happy. However I needed to make decisions and that was all a test, primarily of loyalty to someone when things weren't going so well as opposed to the loyalty I felt when they were all going well. Once I realised that - it took me eighteen months just to do that - I could turn round and face what needed to be done to complete the test (at the moment I am in the Nine of Swords - on tenterhooks waiting for the results!!!), in the knowledge that I still had what was really important, and more importantly, I was in the right place at the right time to influence events once they started to happen again. Therefore actually this card in a reading gives me hope that things are not as bad as they seem. I finally passed through the door at the other end of the tunnel and back into the light.