Strength

✦ Card Title

8. Strength

✦ Associations

Fire / Leo (Sun)

✦ Keywords

Inner strength, compassion, bravery through vulnerability, befriending the wild within, facing fear with love.

✦ Meaning

✦ Fear and Courage

There's a saying that goes something like, "Courage isn't the absence of fear, but the facing of it." There's another that goes, "Fearlessness is not bravery; it's stupidity." (I may have made that second one up.) The point is this: feeling fear is not a weakness. It's natural, human, even smart, evolutionarily designed to keep us safe from danger. However, fear can also be paralyzing, or lead to an overly safe and cloistered life—a life of fear without courage. Having courage requires being afraid, and then overcoming it. Another word for courage is strength.

✦ Nature of Strength

The strength of the Strength card is not related to bulging muscles and brute force, nor to impervious defenses and iron commands. This is not the driven strength of the Chariot nor the systemic strength of the Emperor. This strength is something else entirely. This is the strength to be vulnerable.

✦ Pollack and Imagery

In her seminal Tarot text Seventy-eight Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel Pollack references the Smith-Waite imagery in which a woman gently places her hands on a lion's maw. "The lion signifies all the feelings, fears, desires, and confusions suppressed by the ego in its attempt to control life," Pollack writes. She draws a comparison between Strength and the Chariot, noting that the Chariot pulls on these same desires and feelings as fuel for their progress, but always controls that energy, steering it with the power of their will. In contrast, "Strength allows the inner passions to emerge, as the first step in going beyond the ego."

✦ Release and Integration

Here in Strength, we are not taming the lion, not in the traditional sense of control and force, leashes and commands. We are instead releasing the beast, allowing it to run free so we may understand its wildness as a part of ourselves. In Strength, we paradoxically release control in order to gain it, or something like it, which is the peace of a fully realized and integrated soul. Pollack likens Strength to opening the Pandora's box of our full personality, but doing it with "a sense of peace, a love of life itself, and a great confidence in the final result." This approach is essential because, as she notes, "Unless we truly believe that the process of self-discovery is a joyous one we will never follow it through."

✦ Open-Hearted Courage

In the Strength card, we find the courage: to face what scares us, whatever that may be, and to do it with an open heart. Maybe it's the strength to sit with uncomfortable emotions and painful truths. Maybe it's the strength to open our hearts to that which might hurt us. Maybe it's the strength to trust that it won't. This strength is gentleness instead of force, compassion instead of control, love in the face of hate. In Strength, we do not put up our guards; we remove them.

✦ Pit Bull Imagery

In our card, a person kneels beside a pit bull, which is perhaps the most misunderstood of dog breeds, feared for its crushing jaws and supposed viciousness. This viciousness is not innate to the breed, however, but is instead a product of dog fighters and abusive owners. Far from violent, pit bulls are in fact a gentle and affectionate breed, beloved of families and children. But like any creature that is subject to abuse or deprived of love, any dog is liable to lash out from a place of fear, pain, or confusion.

✦ The Beast as Trauma

In Strength, this snarling beast is our past traumas, our wounds, our inner demons, our mighty desperate places, the tangles within ourselves that refuse to be smoothed out or glossed over. The beast is also our external challenges, difficult situations we may find ourselves in, frightful storms we may have to weather as we move through life. But Strength does not run from these terrors. Instead, they kneel beside the beast. They remove its chains. They place their hands gently but firmly upon its coat.

✦ Compassion and Integration

Strength embodies us to face these inner complexities and outer challenges, but also advises us to not obliterate them with force and therefore perpetuate the cycle of violence. Sit with them instead, Strength says. Listen to them, love them. Strength introduces us to our wild beast, our ugliness, our gnashing teeth, and asks us not to chain it up but to integrate it calmly and peacefully into our wholeness. Because when you treat a creature with compassion, when you extend love to it even when it's being beastly, then it might receive that love. It might return it.

✦ Softness and Resolve

Be strong, this card says, but also be soft: Be gentle, but don't give up. And when the night is darkest, take comfort in the blazing boldness of your vulnerable heart, for true strength is the courage to meet your fears without weapons, only with the radical compassion of unguarded flesh, the tender resolve of a scarred heart.

✦ Trust as Core

And here is the most important thing, the place where Strength starts and ends: above all else be courageous enough to trust, for that is the way to peace.

✦ Final Scene

Strength kneels before the beast with its crushing jaws and pointed teeth and takes off its collar. Strength pets the beast softly, one hand on its velvety maw, and the beast does not bite them. The beast licks.