Tarot card meanings · Swords
What does Eight of Swords mean in tarot?
In A. E. Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), the Eight of Swords upright means “crisis, censure, power in trammels, conflict, calumny”, and reversed “Disquiet, difficulty, opposition, accident”.
Upright
Crisis, censure, power in trammels, conflict, calumny.Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Part 3
Reversed
Disquiet, difficulty, opposition, accident.Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Part 3
What does the picture show?
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.Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Part 3
Where does the Eight of Swords fall in a reading?
Eight of Swords belongs to the suit of Swords. On this site you draw three cards, which take three of the places in the ten-card method Waite describes: “This covers him”, “This crosses him”, “This is before him”. The same card reads differently in each place, and the I Ching cast beside it may agree or disagree.
Ask one question. Draw three cards, and cast an I Ching hexagram beside them to see where East and West agree. Free.
Draw three cardsWaite's words are quoted as printed, and left out where they speak of money, law, illness or disaster. The pictures are the 1909 deck drawn by Pamela Colman Smith. For entertainment and self-reflection.