The Three of Cups and the People Who Raise a Cup With You

There is a kind of happiness that only happens in company. Not the quiet contentment of a good evening alone, but the warmth of a table full of people you love, the laugh that runs around a room, the moment someone raises a glass and everyone else does too without thinking. You can't have it by yourself. It is made between people.

One card in the tarot is made of exactly that happiness.

Three in a garden

In Pamela Colman Smith's picture, three young women stand close together in a garden, raising their cups high above their heads so that the cups almost meet. They seem to be dancing, or turning in a circle. Their robes are bright, there are flowers in their hair, and at their feet lie the fruits of a harvest: gourds, grapes and other produce.

A. E. Waite's description is a single line:

Pledging one another. Not just drinking together, but making a promise. A raised cup between friends is a small vow: I'm glad you're here; I'm with you.

Why "healing" is on the list

Waite's list of fortune-telling meanings for most cards is short and practical. For the Three of Cups it includes something unexpected:

Solace and healing are not words you'd expect on a party card. If you have ever been carried through a hard time by friends, you'll understand: the people who sat with you after the funeral, who brought food when you couldn't cook, who kept inviting you out even when you always said no, who laughed with you on the first day you could laugh again: that is a kind of healing nothing else provides.

The card's harvest matters here too. The friends aren't celebrating in a vacuum. They are celebrating something gathered in after a season of work. Friendships are like that: they are grown slowly, through all the ordinary seasons, and then one day you realize how much they hold.

Three is not a crowd

There are three women on the card, not two. A pair is a different story in the tarot: the Two of Cups is the card of partnership, of two people facing each other. Three is a circle. Nobody is facing just one other person. Everybody is part of something larger than a couple.

It shows that most of us need more than one person. Even the closest partnership can't hold everything, and it isn't meant to. The friend you call about your relationship, the sister who knows your history, the colleague who makes the workweek bearable: a life with a few such people in it is held from several sides.

The other side of the cup

Waite also notes that the card "signifies also the side of excess in physical enjoyment", and many modern readers see the reversed Three of Cups as the party that goes on too long: friendship that has become only celebration, or a group in which it is hard to be anything but cheerful.

That is worth noticing too. The best friendships can hold sadness as well as merriment. If the only cup anyone in your circle will raise is a happy one, it may be worth finding, or becoming, the friend who will sit with someone when there is nothing to celebrate.

Who are your three?

If you find you can't think of anyone right now, you're not alone in that either, and it is not a judgment on you. Our essay on The Hermit, loneliness and solitude is written for exactly that place. And if loneliness has become too heavy to carry, there is free, confidential support listed on our safety page.

A garden-ground

The card is set in a garden, outdoors, in the open, with the harvest at everyone's feet. Friendship is like that at its best: not a performance, not a contract, just people in the same field at the end of a season, glad of each other, raising what they have.

Read the full meaning of the Three of Cups, or, for a lighter kind of reflection, The Sun and the Small Joys.