Six of Cups

The Six is memory and innocence. Childhood, nostalgia, kindness given without calculation. It is warm and it is backward-looking, and the card holds both of those facts without resolving them.

Nostalgia, reunion, someone from the past returning. Simple generosity. Reconnecting with what you were like before you learned to be careful.

Stuck in the past. Idealising something that was not that good. Or, more positively, finally moving forward and leaving it behind.

An ex returning, a childhood connection, innocent affection. Reversed, a relationship living entirely on its own history.

A former colleague or employer reappearing. Work connected to children or to heritage.

Money from the past: inheritance, a returned debt, an old arrangement resurfacing. Gifts.

Recovering an earlier, simpler faith. Innocence as something regained rather than merely lost.

Childhood conditions, inherited patterns, family medical history. Comfort and gentleness as treatment.

A child hands another a cup filled with white flowers in a walled garden, with a guard walking away in the background. The security is real and it is also enclosed: the walls that protect are the walls that limit.

Golden Dawn called it Pleasure. Waite read it explicitly as "a card of the past and of memories", and the departing guard is one of Smith's quiet compositional notes about safety that is about to end.