What does Three of Cups mean for career and work?

Team success, collaborative wins, a workplace with real camaraderie.

It favours the group over the individual: the project that worked because the team liked each other, the department that functions, the celebration after a launch. Also read for professional networks, which the card treats as friendships rather than as transactions.

The practical reading is that the social part of the work is doing more than it is being credited with, and that removing it to be more efficient is a common and expensive mistake.

Celebration, friendship, reunion. Good news worth telling people. Collaboration that is genuinely fun.

Its instruction is unusually simple: accept the invitation. The card is associated with the thing that gets declined because of tiredness or work and turns out to have been the important part of the month.

It also favours saying the good news out loud rather than waiting to be asked. Three of Cups is the card of announcing something, and the tradition treats an unshared joy as a diminished one.

Overindulgence, or the third party in a two-person situation.

Also social exhaustion, gossip, and a friendship group that has become draining rather than restorative. That last is the most useful and the least dramatic: a circle maintained out of history rather than pleasure, where everybody is slightly relieved when it is cancelled.

The third-party reading is traditional and worth handling carefully. It describes a configuration rather than an accusation, and it turns up as often for a demanding friend or a relative as for anything romantic.

Upright: friendship, celebration, community, reunion, shared joy

Reversed: overindulgence, third party, gossip, social exhaustion

• Who have I not celebrated with lately?
• Which friendships feed me, and which do I maintain out of habit?