What does Eight of Swords mean reversed?

The Thoth Tarot is traditionally read without reversed cards: the reader judges from the cards around it whether a card is well or ill dignified. This is its ill-dignified or blocked reading: Obstacles that begin to dissolve; or blocks that worsen because you lack the courage to choose.

What are the Kabbalah and astrology correspondences of Eight of Swords?

In the Golden Dawn system Eight of Swords corresponds to the sephirah Hod, the element Air and Jupiter in Gemini in astrology.

Thoth Tarot · Minor Arcana

Eight of Swords — Interference

Interference

interference · obstacle · indecision · scatter · restriction

A reflective starting point

What is Eight of Swords — Interference asking you to look at?

Meaning changes with the position, the surrounding cards and your question. Take what follows as a language, not a verdict.

Read this card in a ritual Draw it from your own deck

Upright

Identify the real interference, separating it from the imagined ones, and concentrate your forces on the essential.

At first sight

Interference, unexpected obstacles, impediments that hold back action. It points to situations blocked by details, by outside people, or by an excess of options and scruples.

Within you

The distracted, overloaded mind, lost in alternatives and doubts until it can no longer move. Often the cage is made of your own thoughts.

On the path

Air in Hod, intellectual Splendour, with Jupiter in Gemini, his sign of detriment, in the first decan: Jupiterian benevolence fragments into Mercurial multiplicity. Interference is the will scattering in a thousand directions for lack of a centre.

The shadow

Ill-dignified, it signals confusion, paralysis, pettiness, an inability to see the whole.

Reversed

In the Thoth tradition a reversed card is read through its dignity with the neighbouring cards; this is its shadow side.

Obstacles that begin to dissolve; or blocks that worsen because you lack the courage to choose.

In love, work and spirit

Love. Outside interference, doubts, misunderstandings; too many words and too little clarity.

Work. Bureaucracy, setbacks, small errors that slow things down; simplifying helps.

Spirit. Freeing the mind of the superfluous to find a single centre again.

Correspondences

Hod · Air · Jupiter in Gemini

Crowley's note

Crowley crosses two long vertical swords with six short swords of different shapes and cultures: a mind disturbed by too many heterogeneous interferences.