What does Nine of Cups reversed mean?

Getting what you wanted and finding it insufficient. Smugness, complacency, or a wish that turns out to have been the wrong wish.

The last is the most interesting and the least comfortable. Wishes are formed by a person who no longer exists by the time they are granted, and the card reversed describes arriving somewhere that was chosen by an earlier version of you.

Also read for satisfaction that requires an audience, which is the display counter rather than the drinking. That is not a moral failing so much as a hollow arrangement, and it is exhausting to maintain.

A wish granted. Emotional satisfaction, comfort, pleasure earned.

Its instruction is short and is the one people find hardest: enjoy it without immediately looking for the next thing. The card is associated with the achievement that gets absorbed in an afternoon and replaced with a new target by the weekend.

The folk reading as the wish card is later than the Golden Dawn attribution and is now near-universal in practice. It is not a promise that a specific wish will be granted, and readers who use it that way are making the deck do something it cannot.

Upright: satisfaction, wish fulfilled, contentment, comfort, pleasure

Reversed: complacency, smugness, hollow success, overindulgence

• What did I want three years ago that I now have?
• What am I chasing that I have already got a version of?