Strength
The Strength card represents our inner power to overcome obstacles through passion balanced with compassion. It symbolizes the harmonious union of our spiritual and animal natures, where raw instincts are tamed not through suppression but through love and understanding. This solar-natured force brings creative energy, courage, and the ability to transform emotions into positive creative power. When Strength appears, it calls us to embrace our unique vitality and individual powers while maintaining dignity and composure.
Keywords
Alchemy
Zodiacal sign of Leo; rulership of the Sun, Uranus ascending; connects Chesed and Geburah on the Tree of Life
Kindred Souls
Daughter of the Flaming Sword; Ankhet and Geb
Essence
Strength and courage. Passion, energy and action. Virtue and pride. Charisma and creativity. Joy and light. Willpower and benevolence. Composure and self-control. Magical powers. Glory of the Sun. Calmness in actions and balance. Breadth of views. Talents and creative abilities. Divine initiation. Spiritual strength and greatness.
Core Meaning
This card tells us that we possess inner strength and power to overcome barriers and triumph. This is solar-natured strength, as this card is ruled by the Sun. It is a constant stimulating force, all-encompassing and fierce. Like the rays of the Sun, it permeates everything around it with life-giving energy that is simultaneously fiery (active) and watery (passive), existing in perfect balance. Its fiery passion is represented by the panther, tamed by the watery passivity of our feminine side. This balance of positive and negative aspects leads to its vitality, passionate and spontaneous, yet solid and stable. It is creative, decisive and purposeful while also restrained and compassionate. Such mastery of one's own passions allows us to fully utilize them for our benefit and the benefit of those around us. It energizes our subtle watery emotions, giving them active and positive creative power. When the Strength card appears in a reading, it usually means we must make maximum use of our unique resilience and individual powers to spread light of enthusiasm and glory around us while maintaining dignity and composure. The strength represented by this card is the strength of love and tolerance, love for others and also love for our own powers and creative potential.
Practical Application
The meaning of this card is that we must dedicate ourselves to fulfilling our task with passion, creative and joyful energy. Only in this way can we fill the situation with our positive energy, fully realize our true possibilities and achieve success in our actions. We must selflessly defend our interests and the interests of others. Perhaps we need to increase our own motivation in a situation or some matter, be more faithful and devoted, more courageous or balanced in our emotions. Sometimes it's better for us to temporarily withdraw from a situation to saturate our spirit with new energy. The Strength card recommends that we find balance in relationships, dedicate ourselves to love without yielding to instincts. It may also indicate that we will soon form some new relationships that will fill us with new life force and joy, or that existing relationships will receive a new turn of passion, love and mutual understanding.
Deeper Understanding
This card contains signs of smoldering sensuality, the very kind that allows us to penetrate deeper into the essence of things, and those realities where our feelings resonate with the invisible currents of emotional and creative energies surrounding us. Light, sounds and movements in the nature around us are perceived by us at the level where we feel our unity with the deep essence of things, inseparably connected with our spiritual being. At the peak of its intensity, this connection allows us to understand and control these essences, since we perceive them consciously. All our emotions, such as love, joy, anger, sadness and fear are no longer felt by us as obstacles, but become new sources of positive creative energy. This ability to manage our emotions and animal instincts gives a powerful new impulse to our true strength, but we do not fight this strength or suppress it, but gratefully accept it, realizing that it is an ancient force that has always lived within us. Our task is not to curse or cripple the force characterized as 'base' instincts, but to tame them and use their energy to gain the courage and fortitude necessary to achieve our goals.
Analysis and Symbolism
The card called Strength represents the astrological sign of Leo. It depicts a panther consumed by fury, whose fierce roar is filled with aggressive animal passion and enormous power and strength. However, we see that all its barely contained energy is tamed and directed by the skillful hand of a vampire woman. As if through some sorcery or magic, she neutralizes this force bursting outward, since this woman is the true strength. She contains all the fierce energy of the beast, only emphasizing her genuine beauty. She pays tribute to the animal's beauty and absorbs its strength, which allows her to control its insatiable hunger. She is open and receptive in her striving for blinding light. Through this, she gains the ability to be nourished by the delightful power and glory of the Sun, which rules over the sign of Leo. In one hand she holds a leash connecting her to the hidden eroticism and passion of the beast, and in the other hand she grasps, raised high in the air, the Holy Grail, filled to the brim with the blazing energy of passions transformed by love. In Phantasmagoria, the Strength card connects Geburah (Severity) and Chesed (Mercy), symbolizing that its energy is simultaneously the energy of passion and compassion.
Transformation of Instincts
The animal instincts and passions living within us are tamed not by violence and suppression, but by recognition and utilization of them — by overcoming old fears, limiting conditions and false moral principles. When our passion gains independence from worldly morality and rationalism, we feel the birth of new forces within us to overcome obstacles and a blazing sense of enthusiasm and self-sufficiency. Brilliant understanding of the essence of things fills every moment of our life with creative energy and sensual delight. By gratefully accepting all phenomena of life, ourselves and others, and rejecting nothing and no one, we gain the ability to merge with the flow of Divine energy. The Strength card is beauty and passion, uniting the spiritual and animal sides of our personality. The result of such unity becomes bright sensuality, growing into universal rapture, into all-encompassing love for everything that exists in life. By harmonizing our animal and civilized sides, we create a personality that is inspiring, creative and self-confident while also showing the deepest attention and parental care to the people around us and the entire world. We gain the skills to direct our forces and desires to where they are most needed, remaining generous and compassionate when necessary. Tamed, our natural animal instincts become exciting desires, erotic love, trembling passion, spiritualized sensuality, joy of life, yielding rapture and true life force. The fierce flame of the masculine spirit, placed in a watery feminine vessel, accumulates heat bursting outward, like boiling blood. The Strength card is a symbol of dissolving our ego in the Eternal and ecstatic merger with the particle of God living in each of us.
Shadow
The untamed panther represents our suppressed fears or passions, sometimes hidden behind false morality, crude bravado or sorrowfully deformed ego. If such an ego gains freedom, it becomes a destructive force that will ultimately inevitably lead us to destruction. Moreover, depending on neighboring cards in the reading, Strength in shadow position may mean that we experience a lack of power or authority. Perhaps someone else is using their influence or basic ego forces against us. Then this card calls us to gather our strength, using the card's energy for this, to unleash our indomitable and bloodthirsty beast, who always remains our servant and guardian. Release all the fury of your imagination, and your enemies will be defeated. Perhaps we need to remind ourselves once more of our own authority, and not even to others, but to ourselves. Maybe we desire something, and then this card calls us to maintain pride, remembering our dignity, and be open before our inner God, to resist the urge to chase after the fulfillment of our desires and allow our higher self and intuitive forces to fulfill these desires when the most appropriate moment arrives. We must remain gracious, virtuous, compassionate and optimistic. Sometimes the meaning of this card's message is to remain focused, determined and success-oriented when our desires are not fulfilled to the degree or at the moment our ego would like. The Strength card in shadow position may also indicate cowardice, depression, self-pity, weakness, harmful habits or loss of hope. When we allow our basic instincts to control us, the inevitable result is suppressed aggression, cruelty or forgetting our values and virtues.
Visual Description
A red‑haired woman stands with arms outstretched under a moonlit sky, wearing ornate jewelry and a flowing skirt. Chains loop from her wrists to a collar on a large black panther at her feet, whose eyes glow orange and mouth is open in a snarl. She holds a small chalice in one hand and a translucent shawl billows behind her. Thorny rose vines with red blossoms wind across the foreground and the card title in Cyrillic appears at the bottom.
Tarot of Vampyres
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