Three of Cups · Cups · Water

Three women stand close on ochre ground, each with a cup raised. The cups are gold, wide-mouthed, and they go up apart: the middle one highest, none touching. The center woman has her back to us, scarlet robe, auburn curls. To her left, a white gown and black curls. To her right, tawny brown, green vine leaves in the hair, a bunch of pale grapes hanging from the free hand. The ground is already generous: round orange fruit heaped in green leaves on one side, a pumpkin and a curl of vine on the other. Behind them, flat blue sky and the numeral III. No landscape, no building, no fourth figure. Three was enough.

The cups are lifted. Nothing is poured.

The Golden Dawn assigns this decan to Mercury in Cancer and titles it Abundance: feeling that has stopped being private and learned to speak. Classically it is the harvest-home of water: the toast, the good news carried to whoever will be glad of it. Waite, who liked to withhold, is plain here: plenty and merriment. The Two of Cups seals a bond; the Three admits a third, and what admits a third cannot stay quiet.

Upright, the tradition reads gladness that wants witnesses: friendship, mutual care, a year’s work brought in with help and marked before it is eaten.

Reversed, the gathering keeps its shape and changes its use. The toast runs long and turns to excess; the company closes and holds a fourth outside; the talk that bound the three turns to talk about someone absent. The grapes stay in her hand either way.

Nothing holds them together but three arms that went up at the same time.