Upright the Eight of Cups is read as a deliberate walking away, disillusionment with what has already been achieved, and a search for meaning that material success has not supplied; reversed, as fear of leaving, stagnation, or avoidance dressed up as patience.
Cartomancers working the suit before the Rider-Waite-Smith deck existed read a bare eight of cups from number and suit alone, generally toward an emotional matter approaching its close rather than toward any specific act of departure; the walking-away reading now standard is substantially Smith's own contribution, supplied by her picture of a traveller leaving eight full cups behind rather than by any older manual. Waite's own printed meaning for the card, discontinuance and the abandonment of a project once dear, sits close to the picture, one of the more stable pairings in the deck between text and image.
The Golden Dawn title, Abandoned Success, frames the same scene from Saturn's angle, success achieved and then deliberately set down, a harder reading than the more romantic quest narrative many contemporary guidebooks now emphasize; Crowley's Indolence, by contrast, reads the departure with real suspicion, closer to a restlessness that abandons unfinished obligations than a genuine spiritual search, and the two occult titles pull the card in nearly opposite ethical directions from the same Saturnine placement.
Reversed, most current practice reads the stalling as fear rather than as prudence, an inability to leave that the upright card's traveller does not share.