Reading time: 20 minutes
Last updated: April 2026
Quick Answer
The Strength tarot card (VIII in RWS, XI in Thoth) depicts a woman gently closing a lion's mouth, not through force but through love and inner composure. Upright, it signifies inner courage, compassionate mastery of instinct and emotion, patience, and the power of gentle persistence. Reversed, it warns of self-doubt, fear, the abuse of power, or the suppression rather than integration of one's instincts. Esoterically, Strength corresponds to the Hebrew letter Teth, the zodiac sign Leo, and the alchemical work of taming the inner beast through love rather than force.
Card Overview: Strength
The Strength card occupies position VIII in the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition (though in older decks and the Thoth Tarot it appears as XI). Its core teaching is one of the most consistently misunderstood in the tarot: strength is not the force that crushes what opposes it. Strength is the love that transforms what would otherwise destroy.
The card's central image, a woman calmly closing the jaws of a lion, has no equivalent in the physical world. It is an intentionally impossible image, not a depiction of a circus trick or physical feat but a demonstration of a more fundamental kind of power: the power that arises when love, patience, and inner composure are fully embodied and operating without self-deception or fear.
In every mystery tradition, the taming of the lion is among the most ancient and universal symbols of initiation. The Egyptian sphinx combines human consciousness with leonine power. Hercules' first labor was to overcome the Nemean Lion, representing the conquest of raw instinctual force as the prerequisite for all higher spiritual work. The tarot's Strength card adds a crucial refinement: the conquest is not killing but taming through love. The initiate does not destroy the instinctual nature but befriends and integrates it.
The Strength card is the eighth station of the Fool's Journey through the Major Arcana (in the RWS tradition) and represents a qualitative shift in how power is understood and used. The cards before it (The Chariot, particularly) deal with external power, the marshaling of force to achieve goals in the world. Strength asks the question that external success cannot answer: what do you do with the power inside yourself, with the raw, primal energies of fear, desire, anger, and grief that no amount of worldly conquest has addressed?
Strength in Initiation Traditions
Manly P. Hall, in The Secret Teachings of All Ages, discusses the lion as the universal symbol of the solar fire within the human soul, the raw, creative life-force that, untamed, becomes destructive and self-consuming, but when mastered becomes the source of magnificent creative power. The woman of the Strength card represents the initiate who has undergone sufficient inner work to approach this force without fear and without the impulse to suppress it. She neither runs from the lion nor cages it; she meets it with such centered compassion that the beast recognizes its own higher nature reflected back and submits willingly. This is the mystery behind all genuine spiritual discipline: it is not the suppression of nature but the elevation of it to its highest possible expression.
Rider-Waite-Smith Symbolism
The RWS Strength card is one of the most serene in the entire deck, despite its apparently dramatic subject matter. A white-robed woman with flowers in her hair gently holds the jaws of a large lion. Her posture is completely relaxed, no strain, no fear, no effort visible anywhere in her bearing. The lemniscate (infinity symbol) floats above her head, the same symbol that appears above The Magician, connecting the conscious direction of will (The Magician at position I) to its highest expression in the body and instincts (Strength at position VIII).
The woman's white robe indicates purity of intention, freedom from hidden agendas or self-serving motivation. Her floral crown and garland connect her to The Empress's domain of natural beauty and cyclical growth, suggesting that this strength arises not from the suppression of nature but from alignment with it. The lion is fully leonine, wild and powerful, not domesticated. This is genuinely raw instinctual force, passion, the primordial id in full expression. Yet it lowers its head toward her hands not in submission to force but in response to something it recognizes: the same warmth that lives in its own solar nature, reflected back through conscious human presence.
The background is a warm golden mountain landscape under a golden sky, the colour of Leo, the sun, and the fire element that governs both this card and the lion's nature. Everything in the image is warm, vital, and alive. There is no struggle in this card, only the gentle miracle of love that is strong enough to hold power without being afraid of it. This is what makes the Strength card so radical: it refuses to frame the encounter between human consciousness and primal force as combat. It frames it as homecoming.
The flowers deserve particular attention. In most tarot interpretations they are noted briefly as indicating the Empress's domain, but their presence throughout the image (crown, garland, perhaps implied in the pastoral setting) speaks to the cultivation required to achieve this state. Flowers do not grow through force; they require patient tending, appropriate conditions, and time. The woman's capacity to stand before the lion without fear is the product of exactly this kind of patient cultivation of her inner life.
The Thoth Tarot Version: Lust
Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot presents the most dramatically different version of this card's energy. Titled "Lust" rather than Strength and placed at position XI rather than VIII, the Thoth version depicts Babalon (the Whore of Babylon from the Book of Revelation) riding a seven-headed Beast while holding aloft the Cup of Abominations and the reins of the Beast simultaneously.
This deliberately provocative image makes explicit what the RWS version implies more gently: the relationship being depicted is not between a virtuous woman and an animal she is domesticating but between a fully embodied, fully conscious being and the most primal forces of creation itself. Crowley's Babalon is not standing apart from the beast, she rides it, she engages with it fully, she makes ecstatic use of its power while remaining the one who holds the reins.
The word "Lust" here does not mean sexual desire in the narrow sense but the full, passionate engagement with life in all its dimensions, what Friedrich Nietzsche might have called the affirmation of existence including its most difficult and dangerous aspects. Crowley wrote that this card represents "the joy of strength exercised" -- not strength as discipline or restraint but as the exuberant expression of one's full vital capacity.
The Thoth version makes the sexual-spiritual dimension of this card's teaching far more explicit than the RWS version, drawing on the left-hand tantric tradition in which sexuality is understood not as an obstacle to spiritual development but as one of its most powerful instruments when approached with full consciousness and genuine respect. Both versions of the card point toward the same fundamental teaching from different angles: the most powerful thing a human being can do is not suppress their primal energies but fully inhabit and direct them.
Upright Meaning: Strength
Key Upright Meanings
- Inner courage: not the absence of fear but the willingness to act despite it, to remain present in the face of what is difficult
- Compassionate mastery: handling difficult emotions, people, or situations with grace and genuine care rather than force or shutdown
- Patience: the understanding that genuine transformation cannot be forced and that sustained gentle effort accomplishes what aggression cannot
- Integration of instinct: working with rather than against one's animal nature, channeling rather than suppressing primal energies
- Gentle persistence: the power of consistent, loving effort over aggressive forcing or dramatic but unsustained exertion
- Self-confidence: deep trust in one's own inner resources, independent of external validation or reassurance
- Vitality: the full, healthy expression of life-force energy without apology or diminishment
- Taming of passions: emotions and instincts channeled productively rather than suppressed into the unconscious or expressed destructively
The Strength card often appears in readings when someone faces a situation that requires more than ordinary willpower. A confrontation with a difficult person, a sustained effort to overcome an addiction or compulsion, the deep work of a long creative project, the patient courage required to stay present in a relationship through a hard season -- all of these call for the woman's quality of strength rather than the warrior's. They require holding one's center while the lion of the situation snarls and tests.
It is also the card of working consciously with your own most intense emotions, not the suppression of anger, fear, grief, or longing, but the alchemical transformation of these energies into usable power. The lion is not destroyed; it is befriended. Your passion and intensity are not liabilities to be eliminated but potent forces to be met with consciousness and deliberately directed. This is what the great spiritual traditions mean by transmutation: not the elimination of the base but its elevation.
When Strength appears in a reading, it often signals that the querent has more inner resources than they currently believe. The card frequently arrives to challenge the story of victimhood or helplessness, offering instead the image of what is possible when one chooses to stop being driven by the lion and to begin, patiently and lovingly, to guide it.
Reversed Meaning: Strength
Key Reversed Meanings
- Self-doubt: not trusting one's own inner resources; giving away one's power to external authorities or circumstances
- Overwhelmed by instinct: passion, fear, or anger operating without conscious guidance or direction
- Suppression vs. integration: burying difficult emotions rather than transforming them, which ensures they surface with greater force later
- Abuse of power: using force, manipulation, or intimidation rather than love and genuine authority as instruments of influence
- Cowardice: retreating from necessary confrontation, avoiding the encounter with what is difficult or frightening
- Misplaced compassion: enabling destructive behavior in the name of love; confusing accommodation with genuine care
- Exhaustion: the profound depletion that comes from sustained forceful effort instead of graceful, sustainable persistence
- Victim mentality: believing oneself to be at the mercy of one's own instincts, emotions, or circumstances without agency
Reversed Strength does not automatically indicate weakness in the ordinary sense. More often it points to a specific distortion in how power is being understood or applied. The most common reversed Strength pattern is the person who controls rather than channels -- who has achieved external composure through suppression rather than integration. This person appears calm but carries a lion locked in a cage inside them, and the strain of maintaining that cage is costing enormous energy that could otherwise be directed toward genuine purpose.
Another reversed Strength pattern is the person who has confused enabling with compassion. Staying with someone whose destructive behavior you continue to excuse "out of love" may feel like the woman's gentle patience with the lion, but it can equally be a failure to require the lion to meet its own higher nature. Genuine love sometimes requires the courage to refuse accommodation, to hold a higher standard rather than simply absorbing whatever comes. Reversed Strength asks: is your patience in service of the other's growth, or in service of your own fear of conflict?
Love, Career & Spiritual Readings
Love and Relationships
In love readings, Strength describes the kind of love that endures -- not passionate infatuation but the deep, patient, lionhearted love that can weather genuine difficulty without breaking. It can indicate a relationship that requires courage and sustained effort, where both people must show up with more than comfort-seeking. It can also indicate a partner whose powerful personality needs to be met with equal inner composure rather than either submission or aggressive counter-force.
Upright Strength in a love reading often signals that the querent has the inner resources to navigate the relationship's current challenges if they are willing to use the woman's approach rather than the warrior's. It suggests that the difficulty is not a sign the relationship is wrong but rather that it is doing exactly what relationships do: pressing on the places where growth is needed.
Reversed in love, Strength can warn against relationships where one person's intensity is chronically overwhelming the other without adequate reciprocal care, or where codependence has been mistaken for devotion. It can also indicate that the querent is approaching the relationship's challenges with too much force (attempting to control the partner or the outcome) or too little (capitulating to avoid conflict). The reversed card calls for the middle path: centered, loving, and clear.
Career and Finances
Professionally, Strength indicates sustained, patient effort -- the kind of deep work that produces genuine mastery over time rather than quick wins. It favors professions that require the management of powerful energies: medicine, counseling, crisis intervention, leadership, the arts, and any field where emotional intelligence and quiet authority are more valuable than aggressive assertiveness. In such fields, the practitioner who can remain centered while others panic or escalate has a foundational advantage that no amount of technical skill can replace.
In financial readings, Strength suggests that the path to stability is not dramatic action but consistent, patient effort. It discourages the impulsive moves that anxiety about money tends to produce and encourages instead the steady, disciplined approach of someone who trusts their own capacity to meet what comes rather than reacting from fear.
Spiritual Development
Strength and the Integration of Shadow
In Jungian psychology, the lion represents what Jung called the shadow: the aspects of the personality deemed too dangerous, too wild, or too embarrassing to include in the conscious self-image. The conventional approach to shadow is to keep it caged (repression) or to deny its existence (suppression). The Strength card offers a third way: integration through conscious encounter and loving attention. Jung wrote that the shadow is "90% pure gold" -- that the qualities we have repressed are not merely liabilities but contain the most concentrated life-force available to us. The woman with the lion is the Jungian practitioner who has sat with her own most difficult inner material long enough to stop being afraid of it and to recognize its formidable potential. This is the alchemical opus in human form: the transformation of the base metal of our worst fears and most embarrassing impulses into the refined gold of genuine character and authentic power.
Strength in Combination with Other Cards
Reading Strength in combination with surrounding cards significantly expands its meaning and practical application in any reading.
Strength + The Moon: The unconscious is particularly active and its contents particularly powerful. The challenge is to approach the irrational, emotional, or instinctual material arising from the depths with the woman's composure rather than being overwhelmed or fleeing. This combination often appears when someone is working through deep psychological material in therapy or through intensive spiritual practice.
Strength + The Tower: A situation of sudden disruption or collapse that requires extraordinary inner steadiness. The usual defenses have been stripped away (The Tower) and only the genuine resource of inner composure (Strength) remains available. This is among the most demanding combinations in the deck -- but also one that can produce remarkable clarity when navigated with consciousness.
Strength + The Star: The work of inner fortitude is being supported by hope and healing. This combination suggests that the difficult inner work the querent is doing is moving toward resolution and renewal. It often appears after a period of sustained difficulty as a signal that the hardest part has been navigated.
Strength + The Devil: A bondage that can be addressed through the approach of loving consciousness rather than forceful resistance. The chains in The Devil card are famously loose -- they could be removed. Strength suggests that the way to remove them is not desperate struggle but the quiet, centered recognition of one's actual freedom. This combination often appears in readings about addiction, compulsion, or relationships that have become destructive.
Strength + Seven of Swords: There may be deception involved in the situation, requiring both the lion's vigilance and the woman's discernment. Inner strength here includes the courage to see clearly what one might prefer not to see rather than allowing the desire for peace to maintain a comfortable blindness.
Esoteric Correspondences
Esoteric Correspondences
- Hebrew letter: Teth (the letter shaped like a serpent or coiled snake), meaning "serpent." The serpent, like the lion, is a symbol of primal creative life-force. In esoteric tradition, the serpent represents the kundalini energy -- the coiled power at the base of the spine that, when awakened and integrated, becomes the primary instrument of spiritual ascent. Teth governs the 19th path on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.
- Zodiac sign: Leo, the sign of the sun, creative self-expression, courageous leadership, and magnanimous heart. Leo's solar energy is precisely the life-force that the Strength card depicts being mastered and given its highest possible expression.
- Kabbalistic path: The 19th path connects Chesed (Mercy/Loving-kindness, the great expansive love of Jupiter) to Geburah (Severity/Strength, the disciplined force of Mars). This path represents the principle by which love and power are integrated: neither sentimentality without force nor force without love, but the dynamic unity of both operating through a single compassionate will.
- Thoth Tarot: In Crowley's deck, this card is called "Lust" (at position XI), a deliberate provocation emphasizing that what is being depicted is not the suppression of desire but its full, conscious, ecstatic celebration. The Thoth version depicts Babalon riding the Beast of the Apocalypse, an extreme iconographic statement of the same principle: the human soul riding and directing its most primal forces rather than being driven by them unawares.
- Alchemy: The Strength card corresponds to the Coagulation stage of the Great Work -- the moment when the purified essence of the alchemical process crystallizes into a stable, permanent form. The Philosopher's Stone of alchemy is not hard rock but the crystallized integration of all opposing principles into a new unity that transcends the original conflict.
- Numerology: As card VIII, Strength carries the energy of the number eight: the number of infinity (as shown by the lemniscate above the woman's head), of cycles, of the regeneration that follows dissolution, of power balanced with justice, and of the karmic principle that force applied rightly returns as strength while force applied wrongly returns as consequence.
The Fool's Journey: The Eighth Test
In the RWS tradition, Strength comes after The Chariot (VII), the card of willpower, directed motion, and the mastery of external circumstances through force of will. The Chariot shows the Fool learning to direct opposing forces in the world -- to harness the black and white sphinxes of instinct and reason -- toward a chosen destination. This is a genuine achievement, and it produces real results in the outer world.
But Strength reveals the next, qualitatively deeper lesson: external mastery is insufficient without inner mastery. The Fool who has conquered the world (The Chariot) now faces the lion within -- the raw instinctual nature, the passions, the fear, the rage, the grief, and the longing that no amount of external success has addressed or transformed. Professional achievement does not end anxiety. Power in the world does not dissolve the shadow.
The Strength card is the Fool's encounter with their own wild, primal nature -- and the discovery that this encounter requires not more willpower but a fundamentally different quality: the loving patience that allows the beast to surrender voluntarily, to recognize its own higher nature, and to offer its power freely rather than having it extracted by force.
This experience prepares the Fool for The Hermit (IX): the deep inward withdrawal that becomes possible only once one is no longer fleeing from one's own inner life. The Hermit's lantern shines inward. You can only go inside peacefully, and illuminate what is there honestly, when you have made peace with what lives within. Strength is the gate through which The Hermit becomes possible.
Working with Strength as a Meditation Object
The Strength card is exceptionally well suited to use as a meditation object -- an image held in the mind during contemplative practice to evoke and develop the qualities it represents. This kind of contemplative engagement with tarot imagery draws on the ancient tradition of visualization meditation used across Buddhist, Hindu, and Western esoteric traditions, in which the practitioner embodies a quality or deity through sustained imaginative identification.
To work with Strength as a meditation object, begin by studying the card in detail for several minutes with eyes open. Notice every element: the woman's relaxed posture, the flowers, the lion's size and power, the lemniscate, the warm golden background. When you close your eyes, hold the image as vividly as possible in your inner vision. Now shift from observer to participant: become the woman. Feel her composure in your own body. Feel the lion's power under your hands, its warmth, its aliveness. Notice any anxiety that arises in you at this imagined proximity to power, and practice meeting it with the same quality of loving steadiness you are attributing to the card's figure.
Regular work with this meditation develops what the card depicts: the inner resource to remain present and centered in the face of what is frightening or intensely demanding. Many practitioners find this visualization particularly useful before challenging conversations, periods of sustained creative work, or situations that have previously triggered overwhelm or reactive emotional patterns.
Historical Context of the Strength Card
The image of a woman with a lion appears in tarot from the earliest Visconti-Sforza decks of 15th-century Milan, though the figure in these early versions is often depicted more as a standard allegory of Fortitude (one of the four cardinal virtues) than as the esoteric symbol it became through the influence of 19th and 20th-century occultism.
The Marseille tradition, which dominated European tarot for centuries, shows the Strength figure (called "La Force" in French) opening a lion's mouth with what appears to be more physical effort than the RWS version implies. The hat worn by the Marseille figure is the same hat worn by The Magician, establishing the same connection that Waite and Smith made explicit with the shared lemniscate: conscious magical will and the strength of integrated instinct are related principles.
Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Colman Smith's 1909 redesign of the Strength card stripped away some of the earlier physical effort implied in the Marseille image and created the image of complete effortless composure that has since dominated the card's visual language. Waite's Kabbalistic analysis placed Strength on the 19th path connecting Chesed and Geburah, a placement that gives the card its particular synthesis of mercy and severity, love and power, that distinguishes it from more simplistic readings of "willpower" or "control."
Frequently Asked Questions
Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness by Rachel Pollack
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Is Strength card 8 or 11 in tarot?
In the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition, Strength is card VIII (8) and Justice is card XI (11). In older traditions and the Thoth Tarot (where it is called "Lust"), these positions are reversed: Justice/Adjustment is VIII and Strength/Lust is XI. Arthur Edward Waite switched the positions in his 1909 deck to better align with his Kabbalistic correspondences. The card's meaning remains consistent across both numbering systems -- what changes is its relationship to the surrounding cards in the Major Arcana sequence.
What does Strength mean in a love reading?
In love, Strength indicates a relationship requiring patient, compassionate commitment -- the kind of love that faces difficulty without fleeing. It can indicate that one person needs to approach the other's emotional intensity or vulnerability with genuine gentleness rather than force or avoidance. It is a deeply positive relationship card suggesting endurance and authentic care, but it also distinguishes between enabling destructive patterns (the misplaced compassion of reversed Strength) and genuinely loving, honest fortitude that serves the other's actual growth.
What is the difference between The Chariot and Strength?
The Chariot governs external willpower, the direction of outside forces toward a chosen goal, and the mastery of external circumstances through disciplined will. Strength governs internal composure -- the patient, loving management of one's own inner forces, emotions, and instincts. The Chariot asks "How do I win in the external world?" Strength asks "How do I remain centered and loving while the inner lion snarls and tests?" Both are necessary and they work at different levels of the same evolutionary journey.
Can Strength represent a person in a reading?
Yes, Strength can represent a person who embodies its qualities: someone with quiet authority, genuine courage, great patience, the ability to handle powerful personalities or situations without becoming reactive, and the rare gift of meeting others' difficulties with loving steadiness rather than anxiety or force. In professional readings, it can indicate a therapist, healer, counselor, leader, or creative practitioner who has developed genuine mastery through sustained inner work rather than simply technical skill.
What does Strength reversed mean for personal development?
Strength reversed in a personal development reading often indicates one of two things: either the querent is suppressing difficult inner material rather than genuinely integrating it (the lion is caged, not tamed), or they are being driven by instinct and emotion without adequate conscious guidance (the lion is running the show rather than being guided). Both patterns require the same medicine: the willingness to sit with difficult inner experience long enough to stop being afraid of it and to begin relating to it with conscious, compassionate attention rather than avoidance or reactive expression.
How does the Strength card relate to Leo in astrology?
Strength corresponds to the zodiac sign Leo, ruled by the Sun. Leo's core qualities -- creative self-expression, generous heart, regal bearing, courageous leadership, and the warmth that attracts rather than commands loyalty -- all appear in the Strength card's imagery. The golden landscape, the solar energy of the lion, and the woman's queenly composure all speak to Leo's solar nature. Leo's shadow (arrogance, need for approval, domineering behavior) appears in Strength reversed, while Leo's highest expression (magnanimous, courageous, warmly authoritative) is what the upright card depicts.
The Woman and the Lion
The Strength card carries a teaching that no amount of willpower can substitute for: genuine strength is not dominance. The most powerful thing you can do in the face of what frightens you, the impulse to rage, the craving that pulls, the grief that roars, is to approach it with patient, loving curiosity. Not to cage it. Not to pretend it is not there. But to sit beside it, breathe with it, and discover that what you most feared is not your enemy but the raw material of your deepest power. The lion is waiting for your recognition. Not your conquest, your recognition. When you see it truly, it will lower its head. This is the oldest initiation, and it never stops being true.
Sources & Further Reading
- Waite, A.E., The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911)
- Crowley, A., The Book of Thoth (1944)
- Hall, M.P., The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928)
- Jung, C.G., Psychology and Alchemy (1944)
- Wang, R., The Qabalistic Tarot (1983)
- Hollis, J., The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife (1993)
- Pollack, R., Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (1980)
- Place, R.M., The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination (2005)