Dodal, linked reproduction
Neuf de Coupes
Jean Dodal’s Marseille pack · Lyon, 1701–1715.
Read the BnF catalogue record ↗A display of satisfaction
Compare what an orderly group of nine cups does with and without a person before it.
Start with the pictures
Nine of Cups
Pamela Colman Smith · 1922 printing, p. 209
Open the source scan page ↗Notice what changes
Dodal
Neuf de Coupes
Nine cups fill a regular three-by-three arrangement. Small coloured plant details occupy the narrow gaps; surface wear is visible across the reproduction.
Smith
Nine of Cups
A seated figure folds both arms beneath a row of nine cups arranged on a curved, draped surface.
Harris
Nine of Cups · 9
Nine gold cups form a bright square arrangement, each receiving or spilling white-blue water. Repeated streams link the rows.
Open Harris’s painting and reference page ↗Now read the authors
Waite’s explanation
Waite begins with material satisfaction and a feast whose abundance seems to extend into the future. He also notes that the picture gives only one side of the card’s possible meanings.
Crowley’s explanation
Crowley calls this Happiness, describing Water restored to stability through Yesod and Jupiter in Pisces. He reads the filled, overflowing square as the culmination of the element’s beneficent force.
Does satisfaction seem to belong to a person, to possession or to the flow through the whole arrangement?
Write one thing you can point to in the image, one interpretation from a named author, and one inference of your own. Keeping the three separate gives you something useful to revisit.
Sources and image credits
The Dodal cards are one early-eighteenth-century Marseille witness. The black-and-white Smith plates come from the 1922 Rider reprint, whose title verso lists first publication in 1910. Colours in later editions can differ.
Foolmade supplies the linked Dodal reproductions. Its surrounding commentary is not the basis for our historical claims. These images are linked externally; the Smith illustration reuses the public-domain source scan with its full page context.
Harris’s paintings are linked on their host’s reference pages. Crowley’s text is the separately identified Thelemagick transcription of The Book of Thoth. Neither a modern reproduction nor a transcription replaces examination of the original artwork or edition.