MINOR ARCANA · WANDS · FIRE
Eight of Wands
Tarot card meaning · Lord of Swiftness
UPRIGHT
Swift movement, news, momentum.
REVERSED
Delays, frustration, waiting, scattered energy.
The card
The Eight of Wands is the eighth card of Wands, the suit of Fire: will, energy and ambition.
The Golden Dawn named it the Lord of Swiftness and gave it Mercury in Sagittarius, the decan of 0°–10° Sagittarius, which the Sun passes through each year from about 22 November to 2 December.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Eight of Wands, 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:
The card represents motion through the immovable—a flight of wands through an open country; but they draw to the term of their course. That which they signify is at hand; it may be even on the threshold. DIVINATORY MEANINGS Activity in undertakings, the path of such activity, swiftness, as that of an express messenger; great haste, great hope, speed towards an end which promises assured felicity; generally, that which is on the move; also the arrows of love. REVERSED Arrows of jealousy, internal dispute, stingings of conscience, quarrels; and domestic disputes for persons who are married.
FURTHER MEANINGS Domestic disputes for a married person.
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
The Magician: its planet, Mercury · Temperance: its sign, Sagittarius
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 Bâtons (batons). 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.