Querent
Strength

Major Arcana · 8

Strength

La Force · Fortezza · Lust (Thoth)

The Strength tarot card meaning runs through both orientations: upright, inner strength, courage, compassion; reversed, self-doubt, force used wrongly, raw emotion ungoverned. Below, its imagery across the Rider–Waite–Smith, Thoth, and Marseille decks, and what the tradition’s writers said about it.

Element
Fire
Planet
Sun
Zodiac
Leo
Hebrew
Teth
Numerology
8
Timing
Leo season (July–August); within weeks; Sundays (Sun day).

Upright

  • inner strength
  • courage
  • compassion
  • patience
  • self-mastery
  • tender power

Reversed

  • self-doubt
  • force used wrongly
  • raw emotion ungoverned
  • weakness through fear

Strength Tarot Card Meaning

Upright

[object Object]

Reversed

[object Object]

The image, three ways

Rider–Waite–Smith

A woman in white, crowned with flowers and the lemniscate, gently closes the jaws of a lion. She does not fight him; he yields. Mountains rise behind. Roses bloom around them.

Thoth

Renamed Lust. A naked woman rides a seven-headed lion, holding the Holy Grail aloft from which flames erupt. Crowley restores the card's wild-power dimension — it is not taming but joyful union with the beast.

Marseille

La Force — a woman in a wide-brimmed hat (often resembling the Magician's lemniscate hat) opens (or closes) a lion's jaws. The card's number is 11 in this tradition — Waite swapped Strength and Justice.

Four ways a reversal speaks

After Mary K. Greer, Tarot Reversals (2002)

  1. 01 · blocked

    Self-doubt eating courage; the lion within unfed and starving.

  2. 02 · shadow

    The disowned wild side; cruelty that comes from suppressing rather than integrating fierceness.

  3. 03 · internalized

    Anger turned inward; the unmastered animal devouring the keeper.

  4. 04 · excessive

    Forced patience that has become repression; gentleness performed over real fury.

What the tradition says

  • A.E. Waite · 1910

    The Pictorial Key to the Tarot

    Power, energy, action, courage, magnanimity; also complete success and honors. The 'innocence of the dove' joined to 'wisdom of the serpent.'

  • Aleister Crowley · 1944

    The Book of Thoth

    Lust — joyful union with the unconscious. The naked priestess rides the beast, the Grail blazes; this is not taming but delight. Crowley's most provocative recovery.

  • Rachel Pollack · 1980

    Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom

    Strength is the discovery that what we feared as the beast is actually our ally — that compassion is the most direct path to power.

  • Sallie Nichols · 1980

    Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey

    Nichols reads Strength as the integration of the shadow's instinctual life — the Beast Within transformed not by suppression but by relationship. The maiden's gentleness with the lion is the psyche's gentleness with its own animality, which is the precondition for any genuine spiritual maturity.

  • Mary K. Greer · 1984

    Tarot for Your Self

    Greer asks the Strength querent to identify the lion they have been at war with — anger, hunger, grief, libido — and to start a written dialogue with that energy on the page. The card's medicine is the surprising intelligence of the disowned.

Shadow

The repressor who calls suppression strength; the spiritual person uncomfortable with their own anger; the gentle mask hiding contempt.

Archetypal role

The Lion-Tamer / The Compassionate Warrior / The Self-Mastered

Historical notes

Waite swapped Strength (originally 11) and Justice (originally 8) to align with astrological correspondences in the Golden Dawn system — Strength to Leo, Justice to Libra. Marseille decks retain the original numbering. Crowley renamed the card Lust to recover its erotic-spiritual dimension; the Whore of Babalon riding the Beast is his image of redeemed desire.

Neighbouring arcana

Strength combinations

Bring this card into a question

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