71-Eight of Pentacles – Upright Rider Waite Deck

Your Chosen Card – Eight of Pentacles Upright Rider Waite Deck

When upright, the Eight of Pentacles shows a craftsman perfecting his skills and working diligently to do an excellent job. This is a card of training and apprenticeship with the goal of honing one’s abilities to produce a quality product. There is much satisfaction in attending to details and doing things well, even if it takes several attempts to get it right. The artisan on the card is willing to put in the necessary time and effort. He understands the need to be patient and allow things to mature properly rather than try to rush the process. Traditionally this card refers to an amiable and modest peasant girl who approaches her chores diligently without complaint or pretension, as symbolized by the sign of Virgo associated with the card.

Keywords Upright: Work, employment, training, apprenticeship, careful preparation, putting in the effort to do a task well, competence, dedication, patience, job satisfaction, skill in material affairs, honing one’s talents, technical expertise, doing your homework, dexterity, prudence, discretion, diligent labor, perfectionism, determination to do a good job, making good use of available resources, getting paid for what you love to do.

Timing: 0 Virgo–10 Virgo. Tropical, 23 August–1 September. Sidereal, 17 September–26 September.
Astrology: The proud and powerful Sun in the first decan of earthy Virgo, realm of the Knight of Pentacles (Fire of Earth) and the Hermit (Virgo). The Sun in Virgo is known for its perfectionism, service-orientation, and meticulous attention to detail.
Number Symbolism: 8 – movement, action, power, determination.

Rider Waite: An artist in stone at his work, which he exhibits in the form of trophies. Divinatory Meanings: Work, employment, commission, craftsmanship, skill in craft and business, perhaps in the preparatory stage; (R) 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.

When Eight of Pentacles is upright you can pretty much take it that life is going well but that’s when life takes us by surprise.  If Eight of Pentacles is unclear it may help to choose a card from the Major Arcana to provide more insight into what it is Eight of Pentacles is trying to tell you.  If you had a particular issue in  mind, or want to seek clarification on something else, you can also choose again to get more guidance.

This chosen card is part of your upright card reading for Eight of Pentacles using cards from the Rider Waite Tarot Deck. You will find many more tarot pages that will be of great help if you need tarot card meanings. Use the search at the bottom of the page. We have some amazing tarot books for you to browse. Please see below.


Here are some snippets from a few of my favorite books

Complete Book of Tarot
Book Details
Complete Book of Tarot: Waite (1911): A sculptor at his work in a monastery. Compare the design which illustrates the Eight of Pentacles. The apprentice or amateur therein [in the Eight of Pentacles] has received his reward and is now at work in earnest. Divinatory Meanings: Métier, trade, skilled labor; usually, however, regarded as a card of nobility, aristocracy, renown, glory; (R) mediocrity in work and otherwise, puerility, pettiness, weakness.

Tarot Books

Creative Tarot: Late in his life, Dalí decided to create his own deck of tarot cards. He worked from the basic definitions of the cards as outlined by Waite and Smith, but he deviated from their basic templates. He used images that came to him in dreams, alongside ancient Roman and Christian iconography to create a very surrealist deck. Where Smith created clean, simple to understand images, Dalí designed bizarre landscapes. The great Spanish artist was nearing the end of his life, and his cards’ images are based on a lifetime of knowledge of art history, the power of the icon and the symbol, and many figures—such as his strangely elegant elephants with long, spidery legs—that recurred in his artwork throughout his career.

Complete Book of Tarot: Unfortunately, complete sets of these early tarot cards no longer exist. The Pierpont-Morgan Bergamo deck, produced in 1451, originally consisted of seventy-eight cards. The Cary-Yale deck, which may be the oldest extant set of tarot, probably contained eighty-six cards in all. At some point, card makers decided to limit the ‘standard’ tarot deck to seventy-eight cards comprised of twenty-two trumps, forty numbered pip cards, and sixteen court cards, as we have today.

  • Do get in touch if you looked for Eight of Pentacles and we don’t have it listed. We would be more than happy to source the information for you. We hope you visit again for more online tarot information!

Tarot Triumphs: Here is how my own Tarot collection and my relationship with the Tarot progressed. After I had bought my first two packs, the Marseilles and the Rider-Waite Tarots, I went on the hunt for more. Over the next few years, general interest in Tarot blossomed, and more packs were beginning to appear in the shops. Living in London in the early seventies, I haunted Watkins Books, long a home of esoteric books and now of Tarot cards too. I bought practically every pack I could find with the idea of forming a collection. The choice was still very limited though; I acquired a Swiss Besançon pack, the Richard Gardner/Insight Institute pack (a hybrid of Rider-Waite and Marseilles), and a gilded version of the Oswald Wirth pack. I bought other Tarots that were too fanciful for use, and some double-ended packs that were really just for card games. It wasn’t long before my collection, now into double digits, divided itself clearly between packs I could use for Tarot study and divination and those that were just curiosities. As the world began to take up Tarot, I found the proliferation, quite frankly, bewildering, and I decided to limit my collection and enjoy what I had there already. However, I did make occasional additions; a special find in Venice were two beautiful reproductions of historic Tarocchi packs. By this time I had decided to limit my interests mainly to traditional Tarot. Here, I felt, lay the true story.