MINOR ARCANA · CUPS · WATER
Eight of Cups
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Abandoned Success
UPRIGHT
Walking away, seeking deeper meaning.
REVERSED
Fear of change, aimless drifting, returning.
The card
The Eight of Cups is the eighth card of Cups, the suit of Water: emotion, love and intuition.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Abandoned Success and gave it Saturn in Pisces, the decan of 0°–10° Pisces, which the Sun passes through each year from about 18 to 28 February.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Eight of Cups, with the title and the zodiac decan from the Golden Dawn, as shown above.
In Waite's words
Arthur Edward Waite designed the deck that Pamela Colman Smith drew, and explained it in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911). His text, with his spelling:
A man of dejected aspect is deserting the cups of his felicity, enterprise, under-taking or previous concern. DIVINATORY MEANINGS The card speaks for itself on the surface, but other readings are entirely antithetical—giving joy, mildness, timidity, honour, modesty. In practice, it is usually found that the card shews the decline of a matter, or that a matter which has been thought to be important is really of slight consequence—either for good or evil. REVERSED Great joy, happiness, feasting.
FURTHER MEANINGS Marriage with a fair woman. REVERSED Perfect satisfaction.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London: William Rider & Son, 1911), Part III §§ 2 and 4. Public domain; text from the 1922 printing on Wikisource.
Related cards
The same card in the other suits
In three historical decks
The same card as it was painted in fifteenth-century Milan, printed in the French pattern of the Tarot de Marseille, and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for the Rider–Waite–Smith deck.
In the Tarot de Marseille: Eight of Coupes (cups). The numbered cards carry no scene, only the suit's symbols arranged as on a playing card, so they are read from the number and the pattern.
Learn more in the lessons
- The Tarot & the Stars — Decans, Pips & Courts · 16 min
- The Structure of the Tarot · 14 min · free
- Reading the Cards · 16 min
Images: Pamela Colman Smith, 1909 (public domain); the RWS1909 scans on Wikimedia Commons. Lequart, Paris, c. 1890 (public domain); scans from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica), via Wikimedia Commons. Attributed to Bonifacio Bembo, mid-15th century (public domain); scans by David Madore, via Wikimedia Commons.