MINOR ARCANA · PENTACLES · EARTH
Eight of Pentacles
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Prudence
UPRIGHT
Diligence, apprenticeship, mastery through practice.
REVERSED
Perfectionism, lack of focus, uninspired work.
The card
The Eight of Pentacles is the eighth card of Pentacles, the suit of Earth: money, work and the body.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Prudence and gave it Sun in Virgo, the decan of 0°–10° Virgo, which the Sun passes through each year from about 23 August to 2 September.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Eight of Disks, 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:
An artist in stone at his work, which he exhibits in the form of trophies. DIVINATORY MEANINGS Work, employment, commission, craftsmanship, skill in craft and business, perhaps in the preparatory stage. REVERSED Voided ambition, vanity, cupidity, exaction, usury. It may also signify the possession of skill, in the sense of the ingenious mind turned to cunning and intrigue.
FURTHER MEANINGS A young man in business who has relations with the Querent; a dark girl. REVERSED The Querent will be compromised in a matter of money-lending.
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 Deniers (coins). 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.