The Eight of Swords opens the Gemini decans in the air suit's zodiacal sequence, falling under Jupiter and carrying the Golden Dawn title Shortened Force, which the Thoth deck renders as Interference, both names pointing to power blocked rather than power absent.
Pamela Colman Smith's picture, a bound and blindfolded woman standing amid eight swords planted around her like a fence, is one of the deck's most discussed images for what it deliberately withholds: the swords do not fully enclose her, a path is visibly open, and her bonds, on close reading of the printed image, are loose rather than tight. Waite's own text draws attention to this directly, describing her position as less severe than it first appears, which makes the card one of relatively few in the deck where the artist and author agree that the picture's apparent danger substantially overstates the real one.
No such ambiguity exists in the Marseille pattern, whose Eight of Swords is eight blades in a lattice with no figure to be trapped or freed. The Sola Busca deck, the main precedent generally credited for Smith's illustrated pips, has been suggested by some historians as a possible influence on this composition, though as with several of the coin and cup cards, the connection is not as firmly established as it is for the smaller set of cards where the borrowing is considered documented. The Thoth deck keeps the title Interference and renders the eight swords as a jagged geometric cage without any bound figure at all.