AUTHOR’S NOTE: It has always been my opinion that the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was on the right track with the 8 of Cups as “Lord of Abandoned Success” (although the ambition being thwarted seems to fall within the purview of Wands, not Cups). The only reason I can see for Aleister Crowley to change it to “Indolence” is that he wanted a single-word title to express his alchemical vision, and Harris came up with an image to match. Perhaps he was trying to demonstrate what Kurt Vonnegut said about writers who use semicolons: that he “went to college” and had the vocabulary to prove it.

“Abandoned success” does not necessarily have to be a bad thing. Suppose the cost of an endeavor is going to dramatically exceed the anticipated profit with no reasonable chance of recovery. There is little shame in getting out well before that happens. It’s called “cutting your losses.” “Indolence,” however, implies slothfulness, and there doesn’t seem to be any redeeming advantage to such lethargy unless one must come out the bottom before once again rising to the top. In that sense, renouncing a goal becomes a painful but valuable “lesson learned.”

The Waite-Smith tarot does a credible job of showing interrupted progress. The man in the scene has looked inside the eight cups and has found nothing of value there, so he is walking away with his gaze downcast in defeat. The idea of abandonment comes across strongly, but I’ve taken it a step further by assuming that something in his prior experience has “poisoned the well” (Crowley also mentioned “miasmatic poison”) and he has just now discovered it. He’s not forsaking an opportunity so much as saving himself from the further abasement that indolence can produce if allowed to fester. In that sense he is climbing the road in the background to escape the taint of corruption, thinking that he will find salvation over the next hill.

I recognize that the the artwork in the Thoth 8 of Cups accurately captures the enervated mood of the Golden Dawn’s title. I’ve always been partial to Crowley’s idea that the card represents the decay (or cleansing “rot”) that follows the corruption of the 7 of Cups. In short, it is an incipient corrective rather than a further degradation. But this seems to have little to do with abandoned success since it is an organic phenomenon and not an intentionally “willed” one. Abandonment implies being forced to give up, while indolence suggests a creeping lack of vigor that negates all enterprise. It seems to me that the RWS 8 of Cups hints at a “way out” for the beleaguered individual while intimations of recovery in the Thoth version are far more remote; in the latter, one must endure the “maggots”of putrefaction before receiving the boon of purification, although in both cases the 9 of Cups offers redemption.