The Eight of Wands opens the Sagittarius decans in the fire suit's zodiacal sequence, ruled by Mercury and carrying the Golden Dawn title Swiftness, and it is one of only a small handful of Rider-Waite-Smith minor cards with no human figure in the composition at all, a choice usually read as deliberate: eight wands flying in parallel through open air over green country say everything the card needs to say about speed without anyone present to slow the image down by being looked at.
The card is frequently paired, for this reason, with the Ace of Swords and a few other largely figureless minors as evidence that Smith varied her compositional approach considerably across the seventy-eight cards rather than applying one formula throughout; most of her pips do include people, which makes the exceptions worth noticing. No equivalent composition exists in the Marseille pattern, whose Eight of Wands is eight batons in a lattice, meaningful to a cartomancer through number and suit rather than through any sense of motion, since the Marseille image, like all its numbered pips, does not move.
Mercury's rulership fits this card more comfortably than it does several of Book T's other planetary assignments, since Mercury governs speed, messages and travel across the wider astrological tradition independent of tarot; the Thoth deck keeps the title Swiftness and renders the eight wands as a dynamic diagonal geometric pattern, arguably even more purely kinetic than Smith's picture, since it dispenses with landscape as well as figure.