MINOR ARCANA · SWORDS · AIR
Eight of Swords
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Shortened Force
UPRIGHT
Restriction, feeling trapped, self-imposed limits.
REVERSED
Release, new perspective, freedom from limitation.
The card
The Eight of Swords is the eighth card of Swords, the suit of Air: thought, conflict and truth.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Shortened Force and gave it Jupiter in Gemini, the decan of 0°–10° Gemini, which the Sun passes through each year from about 21 to 31 May.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Eight of Swords, 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 woman, bound and hoodwinked, with the swords of the card about her. Yet it is rather a card of temporary durance than of irretrievable bondage. DIVINATORY MEANINGS Bad news, violent chagrin, crisis, censure, power in trammels, conflict, calumny; also sickness. REVERSED Disquiet, difficulty, opposition, accident, treachery; what is unforeseen; fatality.
FURTHER MEANINGS For a woman, scandal spread in her respect. REVERSED Departure of a relative.
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
Its trumps
Wheel of Fortune: its planet, Jupiter · The Lovers: its sign, Gemini
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 Épées (swords). 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.