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Minor Arcana · Suit of Pentacles · Number card
Eight · Pentacles
A card that falls upside down is read reversed.
Key words
↑ UprightDiligenceLearning a craftSteady practice
↓ ReversedSkill misusedCutting cornersEmpty ambition
What it means
↑ Upright
One pentacle after another, carved at the same bench and hung up as each is finished. The old meanings are work, employment and skill, perhaps still at the stage of preparing. Repetition is the teacher here: choose the task worth getting good at, give it unglamorous hours, and measure progress by the row on the wall rather than by praise.
↓ Reversed
Cleverness without care: ambition that has lost its object, skill bent toward cunning, or work done for show and charged dearly. Waite's list runs from vanity to overcharging. Ask whom your ability is serving, and go back to doing one honest piece well, even if nobody is watching.
Eight is effort, and in Pentacles it is the steady work of learning a craft. In the 1909 Smith–Waite deck, this card shows an artisan at his bench carving a pentacle, six finished ones hung on a post beside him and another at his feet, with a town far off down the road. Waite calls him an artist in stone who displays his work as trophies; the distance from the town is commonly read as skill gained away from distraction.
Upright
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.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Part III.