Strength

Number VIII · Element Fire · Correspondence Leo

Upright: gentle strength, patience, courage, taming instinct, self-mastery

Reversed: impulsive loss of control, heavy-handed suppression, bottled-up feelings, self-doubt, burnout

Real strength gets the fiercest instincts to yield willingly, without forcing them down.

The image

In the Waite image, a woman in white bends forward and rests both hands lightly on a lion's muzzle. This is not a fighting pose, and the lion's eyes are docile, with no sign of struggle. Above her head floats a sideways 8 (the infinity symbol ∞), echoing the symbol above The Magician. It suggests that her ability to tame the lion, like the Magician's ability to marshal his will, can be called on again and again; it is no single stroke of luck. Garlands of flowers are often wound around her waist and in her hair, showing that this strength is gentle and alive, with nothing cold or coercive about it.

The green grass beneath them suggests harmony between the two. The lion is fierce, yet it willingly lets itself be tamed, because what tames it is love and virtue from the heart and not brute force, just as a young animal can only be raised with love and cannot be won over by strength alone. Behind her there are often blue mountains, symbolizing gentleness and wisdom and echoing what blue usually stands for: self-discipline, calm and the good qualities in the subconscious. Her golden hair links her to The Fool, The Empress and the charioteer of The Chariot, and like theirs it points to divine and solar energy. The garlands around her waist and hair show that this strength is soft, and they also symbolize success, abundance and self-restraint.

Core meaning

Gentleness over brute force: when facing strong instincts, desires or opposition, patience and love often work better and last longer than meeting force with force.
Release as well as restraint: compare The Chariot, where the charioteer uses willpower to draw on emotional energy and steer it in a chosen direction. Strength first allows the passions, fears and desires that civilized life has smoothed over to come to the surface. This release is the first step beyond the control of the small ego.
Release with limits: even as the lion is let out, it is also calmed and "tamed". This comes from love of life itself and from inner certainty. It does not mean letting instinct carry you wherever it wants to go, and this is the key difference between Strength and the later The Devil.
Inner courage: the card is about psychological calm when facing your own fears and impulses. It does not describe physical power or strength in the sense of social status.
Conscious direction joined with natural instinct: the card can be read as the Magician's sense of purpose merging with the Empress's rich, sensual energy (see The Magician and The Empress). Instinct is given a direction, and it leads toward the inward path of The Hermit.
The ability to build up through patience: echoing the infinity symbol above her head, this taming is no one-time victory. It is a state that only holds steady after repeated practice.
The triple lion and stages of psychological growth: one reading starts from the alchemical idea of the "three-headed lion": untamed raw instinct, instinct guided by reason and higher spirit, and pure awareness beyond time. It maps this order onto the growth from id to ego to superego. What the card shows being tamed is the middle stage: instinct watched over by wisdom but not yet fully transcended.
A practical caution, holding back is different from letting go: the upright card's "soft overcoming hard" can also be closer to "there are still feelings or ambitions inside, but they are kept under control and not acted on", which is not necessarily real peace. So when this card comes up in career or money questions, where you need to go after what you want, it often suggests the querent is hiding their edge too much and unwilling to state what they want, and may easily hand opportunities to others. This angle stands in contrast to the point above about release as well as restraint.
In the alchemical framework of the three-headed lion, the red lion stands for instinct activated by solar energy (sulfur) and guided by wisdom, and its counterpart "mercury" is activated awareness and wisdom. The woman in the picture, like The Empress, stands for the passive and stable quality of "salt". Where mercury, sulfur and salt meet, all things in the world can be born, which is why this card is seen as "full of potential". It continues the mercury, sulfur and salt system of alchemy already seen on The Fool and The Magician ^inferred.
Study: in astrology Leo corresponds to the fifth house, which governs entertainment, so the person this card describes may be easily distracted by arts, entertainment and other interests. On the whole, though, they can restrain themselves and focus fully on study. Whether they get good grades depends more on whether they want to learn than on any limit to their ability.
The function assigned to Teth is "taste", the most intimate of the five senses and the one that most requires closeness to experience. This fits Strength's core meaning of taming instinct through gentleness and intimacy instead of force.
Money, health and spirit: with money, Strength stands for the courage of financial confidence and usually brings a period of financial prosperity. Knowing your financial worth clearly and pursuing your plans with confidence often secures financial success. With health it is linked to Leo, and the heart and spine are the more vulnerable areas. Upright, it broadly means the body is in solid shape and that you can face health issues more calmly.
On the spiritual level, Strength reminds you that even when you have inner doubts, courage still has to be held up by commitment. When life swings wildly and there is no one to lean on, that is exactly when you need to draw on this inner strength and confidence. Even if your reserves have fallen low, inner strength is what lets you face the obstacles in front of you.

Reversed

Picture association: the lion and the woman trade places and the lion is on top. Raw desire overpowers reason, emotion drives judgment, and it is easy to act rashly without thinking. If the lion is read as facing outward, it can also mean that an opponent or outside pressure now outweighs your own side, and you are at a clear disadvantage in a contest.
Overdonewhen the lion completely overpowers the woman, strength goes to the other extreme. Hard or even rough methods are used to suppress other people or one's instincts, the gentle taming of the upright card is lost, and it becomes a head-on clash with no thought for consequences. It is easy to strike out rashly with no chance of winning and get hurt in return.
Blocked / Turned inward: the woman's garland slips off, symbolizing that the connection with inner belief is broken for now. The certainty that supported "soft overcoming hard" has gone, leaving emotions that cannot be held down and self-doubt. Putting on a brave front or bluffing cannot hide the lack of real ability and perseverance, and it is easy to give up halfway.
Negative meaning: once power is abused, it slides into arbitrary rule. Only commands and obedience remain, other views go unheard, and one insists on one's own way. It can also be the opposite: strength itself is lacking, and the situation gradually slips out of control before it can be rescued.
Opposite meaning: the path of soft overcoming hard does not work for now. Swallowing your pride to keep the peace will not win the other person's approval, so it is better to bring the conflict into the open and deal with it. It can also mean there is actually little leverage or courage in hand, or no right method, so effort brings no result or even backfires.
In practicein love, the reversed card often shows as being criticized the moment you walk in the door, with no room even to catch your breath, so you would rather sit alone in the car for a while than go inside and face it. Home no longer nourishes you; it drains you. At work it often describes the type who keeps hitting walls and changing jobs, always blaming it on "never meeting anyone who recognized my talent" and never looking at their own part in it.
One book's take on the reversal leans toward "running on empty". With money, the reversed Strength card suggests emotional ups and downs and doubts about your current finances, or falling into hardship after being driven by instinctive desires for fame, wealth or glory. With health it warns of heart and spine problems, or exhaustion from taking on too much at once without the courage to set a point where you cut your losses.

Correspondences

Number 8, the element of Fire and the sign of Leo; for details see Astrological Correspondences. Its path on the Tree of Life corresponds to the Hebrew letter Teth (ט); see The Kabbalah and the Tree of Life.

Teth literally means "serpent". It calls to mind primal life energy lying dormant and waiting to be awakened, and it carries a double sense of wisdom and temptation. On the Tree of Life, Teth connects Chesed (Mercy) and Geburah (Severity), spanning the gap between the upper and middle worlds. It is the path divine power must take to come down and show itself as concrete virtue, which echoes Strength's core meaning of taming instinct with gentleness and patience instead of simply suppressing it.

Views from different traditions

The Waite system numbers this card VIII so that, once Strength corresponds to Leo and Justice corresponds to Libra, the numbering of the Major cards with zodiac correspondences (the Emperor, the Hierophant, the Lovers, the Chariot, Strength, the Hermit, Justice and so on) lines up with the order of the zodiac.
In the Marseille tradition this card was originally numbered XI (La Force) and Justice was VIII (La Justice), the exact reverse of the Waite deck ^disputed.
Aleister Crowley's Thoth system keeps the Marseille numbering (Strength's position is still eleven) but renames the card "Lust". The image changes from gently taming a lion to a woman riding a seven-headed beast, putting more stress on instinctive desire itself as something to welcome and not merely to soothe. The astrological link with Leo stays the same.
All three traditions agree that this card corresponds to Leo. They differ only in the numbering, and in the differences of image and naming that follow from it.
Pollack points out that in alchemy the lion corresponds to gold, the sun and sulfur. Sulfur is a lower element and gold the noblest, so "taming the lion" can also be read as the alchemical process of turning the lower self into a higher being.
Advanced Golden Dawn reading, and the problem the number swap solves: without the swap, the order would be the Chariot (Cancer), Justice (Libra), the Hermit (Virgo), Strength (Leo), which breaks the order of the zodiac. After the swap it becomes the Chariot (Cancer), Strength (Leo), the Hermit (Virgo), Justice (Libra), which is the correct, unbroken zodiac order of Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra. MacGregor Mathers used this reason to persuade the Golden Dawn to adopt the new numbering. Waite never publicly explained the change, but almost every modern tarot deck since has kept it.