Eight of Swords
Tarot card meaning, upright and reversed
What it means
Upright
This card is read as feeling trapped, often by limits that are looser than they appear. Waite tied it to bad news, crisis, and bondage.
Reversed
Reversed, it is read as release, new perspective, and taking the first step out.
A question to sit with
Which of the swords around you is real, and which is a belief? What would happen if you took one step?
The deeper reading
Readers see here the mind bound by its own story, with the way out close at hand.
What is drawn on the card
A woman stands bound and blindfolded, surrounded by eight swords stuck in the ground. Water pools at her feet, and a castle stands on a cliff behind her.
As Pamela Colman Smith drew it in 1909. Our paintings follow these scenes.
Waite’s own description (1911, paraphrased): A woman, bound and hoodwinked, with the swords of the card about her; a card, Waite says, of temporary durance rather than irretrievable bondage.
- Suit
- Swords
- Element
- Air
- Domain
- Mind, conflict, truth, communication
Where the card comes from
- Tarot began as a card game in 15th-century Italy. The earliest record is from Florence in 1440, and the game is still played today in France, Austria and Bologna.
- Reading the cards for fortunes is documented from Bologna around 1750, with ordinary playing decks.
- In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin wrote that the cards came from ancient Egypt. There is no evidence for it, and he wrote before anyone could read hieroglyphs (1822).
- The Hebrew letters and astrological signs on each card are 19th-century French and English occult attributions; the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1888) fixed the set most readers use.
- The scenes follow the 1909 Waite–Smith deck, designed by A. E. Waite and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith. The Innerverse cards are our own paintings of those scenes.
Sources: Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (1980); Morgan Library & Museum, Visconti-Sforza tarot, MS M.630; Court de Gébelin, Le Monde primitif, vol. VIII (Paris, 1781); A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911).
Draw your own card
Eight of Swords is one of 78. Draw one card or a three-card spread in the Innerverse, read with the same art and the same sources, free.
Or make it daily: one card each morning, with a private note →Want the whole deck? All 78 cards and the guidebook.
Traditional readings, presented as tarot readers have held them. They are a record of a practice, not a prediction.