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Minor Arcana · Suit of Cups · Number card
Eight · Cups
A card that falls upside down is read reversed.
Key words
↑ UprightWalking awaySeeking moreA matter fading
↓ ReversedTurning backJoy regainedReluctance to leave
What it means
↑ Upright
It takes a quiet courage to walk away from eight cups stacked with care. The card points to a matter that has lost its hold — something once thought important turning out to matter little — and to setting out in search of more. If you have outgrown it, you may go without first proving it was worthless.
↓ Reversed
Back to the table: Waite reads this side as great joy and feasting, as though the cups held wine after all. Enjoy what you return to, but be honest about the reason — staying because it still delights you is one thing, staying because leaving is frightening is another.
Eight is movement, and in Cups it is the effort of walking away from what no longer satisfies. In the 1909 Smith–Waite deck, this card shows a man in red with a staff climbing into rocky hills at night, his back to eight cups stacked with a gap in the top row. Above, the moon shows a face within a crescent, often read as an eclipse; the gap is commonly taken as the thing missing that sends him on his way.
Upright
The card speaks for itself on the surface, but other readings are entirely antithetical—giving joy, mildness, timidity, honor, modesty. In practice, it is usually found that the card shows the decline of a matter, or that a matter which has been thought to be important is really of slight consequence—either for good or evil.
Reversed
Great joy, happiness, feasting.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Part III.