Tarot Card Meanings: Strength

The higher you build your barriers
The taller I become
The further you take my rights away
The faster I will run
You can deny me
You can decide to turn your face away
No matter, cos there’s
Something inside so strong
I know that I can make it
Though you’re doing me wrong, so wrong
You thought that my pride was gone
Oh no, something inside so strong

‘So Strong’ by Labi Siffre (Siffre)

Welcome to my strong wheel!

Strength is the eighth card of the Major Arcana in many Tarot traditions, and represents inner fortitude, self-mastery, and the power of gentleness. In this post, I explore what the Strength Tarot card means: from mythology and theology to personal experience, deck art, feminist readings, and more.

Some Tarot traditions have Justice in this position (8), but I like Strength here, as it points to such a radically different kind of power than the previous card – the Chariot – the strength to confront yourself calmly, and without fear.

Symbolism in the Strength card in Tarot

And it’s a message we also see replicated in popular culture too; for example, with Kong and Ann Darrow in King Kong. At the film’s core is the idea that the heroine’s gentle presence soothes the monster’s rage – not always in healthy or uncomplicated ways(!), but nevertheless illustrating the civilising force of compassion.

The maiden, then, represents the inner riches we can enjoy if we bring our wild passions to heel. She has tamed the lion and earned its trust, in just the same way we can learn to love and assimilate the uglier, brutish parts of our own natures.

But the card is not just about the maiden, it’s also about the fierce, roaring – even dangerous – passion and fury of the lion (including emotions like ‘lust’, which is the name the card was given by Crowley in his Thoth deck). The lion’s strength may be frightening, but it is also empowering. Much can be achieved if such power can be harnessed and put to use – but here the harness is not literal (as in the Chariot) but the metaphorical mastery we can learn to have over ourselves and the wilder parts of our emotions. (I also think it’s interesting to note here that Crowley’s Lust leans into indulgence, whereas the RWS’s Strength seeks integration – not to abandon herself to desire, but to become its equal).

So, while the Chariot and Strength cards share similar themes, they diverge in important ways. The Chariot is about direction, using willpower to steer toward victory. Strength, on the other hand, is about alignment – bringing different forces within the self into harmony. The maiden is physically weak but strong in self-mastery. The lion has a powerful body, but lacks inner discipline. Her gentle command balances his brute force; his strength supports her vulnerability.

That’s why the maiden doesn’t try to harness the lion to a chariot, run away from it, or attack it. Instead, she meets its gaze, touches it, embraces it. This card speaks to understanding our wild instincts: accepting them, yet also gentling those passions so that they work for us rather than against us. In combining these two strengths, we find fortitude, integrity, and true courage.

Unlike the commands and rigid social structures of the Emperor, or the moral codes and traditions of the Hierophant, the maiden exerts control by revealing the strengths we gain when we willingly follow her lead. As Thirteen explains on the Aeclectic Tarot website, “the maiden keeps the lion focused, not mute. And the lion gives the maiden the physical power, and, yes, verbal roar that she lacks.”

In many ways the maiden and the lion are like the balance between body and mind; passion and intellect; and rationality and instinct. If the maiden part becomes too strong we become passionless and cold, too much in our own heads. But if the lion takes over we become too quick to anger and lash out; more and more inclined to self-destructive behaviour and addiction. We must learn to let the maiden keep the lion under her gentle control, not allowing him have his way all the time, but not suppressing him either. The lion must be cuddled and cherished, and the maiden must know when to bare her teeth! If we can manage this, we will have the strength to take on all of life’s challenges.

Many cards show a lemniscate hovering gently above the maiden’s head, like a quiet halo of earned wisdom. The lemniscate (from the Latin lemniscatus, meaning ‘decorated with ribbons’) is a symbol dating back to 17^th century mathematics, and is similar (though not identical) to the infinity symbol. It refers to a specific figure-of-8-shaped curve in geometry that has some cool properties in complex analysis and algebraic geometry.

In Tarot, the lemniscate demonstrates the energy of thought and – while they are subtly different – it is often fairly explicitly linked to the infinity symbol, bringing with it the ideas of eternal cycles, endless possibilities, and the unbroken flow of time and energy. It can also be taken to represent the unity of opposites – it’s a single line in perpetual motion, symbolising balance and the constant interplay of dualities (strength/softness, conscious/unconscious, action/rest etc.). The fact that it usually floats above the maiden’s head, not the lion’s, is also significant. It suggests her calmness and grace is not just a personality trait, but a spiritual force, and that she is aligned with something greater than the conventional idea of physical strength – an infinite source of patience and inner resolve as opposed to the temporal nature of brute force or domination. It’s her who is the real strength in the pairing, and this serves as a reminder that true power comes from gentleness, intuition, and long-term harmony, not short-term control.

It also calls back to the lemniscate we see floating above the Magician’s head, but his is more about channelling divine energy into earthly reality. Where the Magician channels energy through tools, symbols, and performance, Strength works without intermediaries. Hers is a quieter magic, rooted in presence rather than spectacle. As Charlie Claire Burgess writes, “Like the Magician, Strength uses both hands, but this time the contact is up close and personal, not commanded at a distance through a magic wand or a pointed finger. This is not a magus directing energy to their will, but a human being having a direct experience with emotion, with struggle, with desire, with life.”

The maiden is often depicted as wearing a rose garland around her head, as well as one around her waist (and occasionally the lion wears one too!) Throughout the Tarot, roses symbolise manifestation, and here the garland can be read both as a mark of the maiden’s civilisation (roses being cultivated blooms) and as a nod to the lion’s passion (red roses signifying sex and romance). However, I think the rose wreath can also be seen as a micro-symbol of the card’s overarching message: inner integration. It’s a representation of beauty and ferocity woven into a single thread, as obvs roses have thorns as well as petals. In this sense the maiden is literally crowning herself with contradiction – softness and danger, charm and resistance. The roses aren’t there to pacify the lion – they mirror him. They say: “I get it. I, too, am made of sharp things and beauty.”

Of the flowers the maiden wears around her waist, A. E. Waite (of RWS fame) writes that the card’s “higher meanings” are “intimated in a concealed manner by the chain of flowers, which signifies, among many other things, the sweet yoke and the light burden of Divine Law, when it has been taken into the heart of hearts.” Waite is paraphrasing Jesus in Matthew 11:30 here: “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” In that passage, Jesus isn’t offering law in the restrictive, punitive sense – he’s offering a kind of relief from suffering through surrender to love, balance, and grace. He’s saying that when we internalise spiritual discipline, when we “take it into the heart of hearts”, it no longer feels like restraint or denial, but instead like clarity and inner peace. The rose garland on the Strength card has a similar message: that true mastery comes only when we embrace discipline not as punishment, but as devotion, and that power ruled by love is the most Divine of all.

I love the strong and obvious trust and affection between the lion and the maiden shown in the Slow Tarot here, as well as Lacey Bryant’s comment that “whatever doesn’t bend, breaks, and the brutally strong find themselves at the mercy of those clever enough to be kind”.

“Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard.”

Lao Tzu, ‘Tao Te Ching‘

And if a lion roars, would you not listen?
And if a child cries would you not forgive them?

‘Strong’ by London Grammar (Rothman/Major/Reid)

The Virgin and the Flame: Feminist Readings of the Strength Card

Readers of this blog will know that I love any opportunity to shoehorn in some feminist ranting, lol, but I genuinely think Strength is a super feminist card. It’s hard to ignore how often society demonises “lust” or “wildness” in women in particular, which makes the image of the maiden not recoiling from that energy, but touching and taming it, feel especially powerful.

Strength also models a kind of power that’s relational rather than forceful – a persuasion through presence, connection, and care. It’s a power traditionally coded as feminine, and often undervalued in  patriarchal systems that reward domination over empathy. For this reason I really like the use of a shark in place of a lion in the Healing Waves Tarot. Sharks carry with them such potent, violent imagery – they’re apex predators, both ancient and unknowable, and as such are often cast as creatures to be feared and destroyed. They’re the stuff of horror films and sensationalist tabloid headlines, rarely granted nuance or grace.

But the mermaid(en) in this card knows better. She doesn’t flee or fight. Instead, she swims alongside the shark, touching the very thing others fear. Just like the maiden with her lion, the mermaid(en) of the Healing Waves represents a different kind of power, one rooted in empathy and the radical act of trusting what we’ve been taught to dread.

I’m just a sucker for the whole Blood Moon Tarot deck, but I really love this image of Strength, melting the blade of a sword with their hands, though their hands still bleed. The artist and creator Sam Guay writes, “where others hide behind suits of armour, she bravely bares her heart”. There’s this amazing commenter on Aeclectic Tarot (Thirteen) who also speaks to this idea that showing this kind of (inner) strength is not without pain. She talks about how Wang in The Qabalistic Tarot likens Strength to a Vestal Virgin tending a sacred flame. Fire is a terrifying thing – burning, destructive, all-consuming – all too easily able to spark out of our control. But somewhere along the way we lost our fear – but not our respect – for fire. With will and intelligence, we came to understand its nature and make it our tool. Similarly, we can direct and make good use of our passions, but only if we’re willing to see them as a natural part of us, sacred even, like the Vestal Virgin’s flame.

As with fire-lighting or lion-taming, you might get burned or scratched a few times by that which you’re trying to understand – be it a situation, a person, or our own impulses. The important message of the Strength card, though, is fortitude. When your gentle strength brings this wild thing under control, you will both be free of weaknesses, and able to command great power. We didn’t get rid of fire because it burned us. Instead we learned how to hold it – in the form of hearths, candles, lanterns. And that’s Strength: not putting the fire out, but learning how to hold it so it lights the way.

As such, I love that Jamie Sawyer‘s “maiden” is an older woman. Yes, I know the archetype is all about purity and innocence overcoming brute power, but in real life it’s often not ‘til we’re a bit older and wiser (and scarred from all the times we took on the lion and lost!) that we finally have the emotional maturity to work in harmony with our baser desires and innate passions. Likewise, in another of her decks, the Out of Hand Tarot, Sawyer’s Strength card depicts hands which look tired and worn (a suggestion of arthritis I feel?) They’re not the physically agile hands they once were – yet in many ways they are stronger than ever. The wisdom and experience of the years has given skill and strength of a different kind, allowing the seamstress to produce her most beautiful work in her twilight years.

The Yokai Yochi Tarot depicts Strength as a shisa, a mythical lion-dog believed to ward off evil spirits. I love the way this version leans into the element of fire, with the shisa’s mane and tail curling like plumes of smoke. To return to Wang’s link between the Strength card and the fire of the Vestal Virgins, their flame wasn’t just symbolic – it was literally essential to the life of Rome. If it went out, it was seen as a bad omen for the entire state. Likewise, our inner fire – our drive, passion, libido, anger, joy – is vital. Not something to be extinguished or suppressed, but to be guarded, as the shisa does here, and tended. Carefully. Respectfully. Daily.

You could even see the lion on the Strength card as a symbol of creative fire – the raw energy of appetite and desire. When left wild, that force can be chaotic or destructive. But when held within ritual (think art, sex, activism, healing) it becomes sacred. Strength reminds us that power doesn’t lie in suppression, but in conscious stewardship of our fire.

To me, the Strength card speaks to one of the fundamental struggles of being a woman in today’s world. We’re so often told to choose: mother or careerist, frigid or slut, feminist or trad wife. Either suppress your passion and anger and be the Virgin, respected and gentle, but also taken advantage of and confined; or express it and be punished for becoming like a ‘beast’ (the Lioness). The Strength card rejects that false binary. It says: you don’t have to choose. You can be both. You are both. And that’s the source of your power.

Loving the Beast: The Strength card and shadow work

A key message of the Strength card for me is that the maiden sees something wonderful in the lion. She doesn’t want to erase it or make it anything other than a lion, but she can see that its energies are being wasted. She is moved to tame it so that they can both benefit. In other words, the maiden’s strength lies not in overpowering the lion, but in recognising its potential and guiding it into alignment. This kind of strength isn’t about domination – it’s about cooperation, trust, and shared purpose. And crucially, it’s not a physical feat, but a spiritual one.

As Richard (on Aeclectic Tarot) notes, “It is important to note that even in the Marseille deck, the woman is holding the lion’s jaws open. This is, of course, impossible (unless the lion is cooperative), no matter how muscular you might be. Don’t try it, even with a pet dog or cat, unless you are prepared to lose a digit or two. As Waite says, ‘This card has nothing to do with self-confidence in the ordinary sense.’ Rather than brute force, the strength indicated by [this card] is essentially a Taoist concept. True strength comes from being in synch with the Tao. Waite would call it conformity with Divine Law. Crowley might express it as acting in accordance with one’s true Will: ‘Thou hast no right but to do thy will. Do that and no other shall say nay. For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.’”

The point about the lion’s cooperation is key: the maiden isn’t overpowering the lion – she’s in harmony with it. That’s the Taoist concept of power: not domination, but attunement. The Strength card here has much in common with wu wei – acting in flow with the natural order rather than against it. In this sense, Strength is not “I overcame my rage” but “I learned to sit beside my rage, and it chose not to bite.” And Crowley – in his Hot Mess Mystic Chaos way – adds the idea that when you are aligned with your truest, highest will, you are unstoppable, not because you’ve forced your way through life, but because you’ve become part of the current.

In Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, it is stressed that knowing when to retreat is as important as knowing when to attack or stand one’s ground. Even in war, effective strength is not measured by brute force. The general who knows when not to fight is the one who wins wars with fewer losses. So much of what we call strength in modern culture is just glorified burnout: overwork, aggression, unrelenting forward motion (you guessed it, I’m kinda dumping on the Chariot again – sorry Chariot!) But Strength in the Tarot is about knowing when to act, and when to wait, when to speak, and when to stay silent, when to lead, and when to follow. The card reminds us that sometimes it takes more strength to step back with intention than to charge ahead blindly. The lion obeys not because he is weaker, but because he sees the wisdom of the maiden’s stillness. Not because he was broken, but because he was met.

I think you can see this concept in both these cards – the doctor tending to the distressed patient in the Unveiled Tarot, and the Ringmistress almost dancing with the lion in the LeGrande Circus Tarot. Both suggest a relationship of care and cooperation rather than control. Not mastering your emotions like they’re enemies – but tending to them like powerful creatures that deserve guidance, not punishment.

In Wild Card Jen Cownie and Fiona Lensvelt describe Strength as “ask[ing] us to make friends with all of the wild, untamed, untidy, and unnamed parts of ourselves, the parts we might have denied, ignored, or been taught to repress.” They note how feminist writers have long reimagined the Beauty and the Beast tale along similar lines: not as a story of masculine aggression soothed by feminine gentleness, but as an allegory of inner integration. The Beast is no longer an intruder or a threat, but an aspect of Beauty herself – one she’s previously stifled for being too wild, too sensual, too much.

As Marina Warner writes in From the Beast to the Blonde, in these reimaginings the Beast “holds up a mirror to the force of nature within her which she is invited to accept and to allow to grow.” True strength lies in self-knowledge and radical self-acceptance. What if, instead of trying to fix or subdue our darker sides, we met them with curiosity, reverence, and open eyes – just as the maiden meets the lion?

As Cownie & Lensvelt conclude, “true strength isn’t taming the beast. It’s realising the beast is you – and loving her anyway.”

I think this idea is so perfectly reflected in the Tarot of the Crystal World by Brooke Penrose – with its ugly, scarred, battered old beast, and its beautiful maiden kissing it with real tenderness. It reminds me of this amazing poem by Ellen Bass. It’s exactly the energy of Strength as commitment – to stay, to face what’s hard, to be present. Not the warrior, not the conqueror, but the one who stays open.

The Strength card is a lesson to honour the humanity in our difficult experiences – anger, grief, self-doubt, pain. What does not kill us makes us stronger.

I really like the use of the Biblical images of the lion and the lamb in the Light Seers’ Tarot. Although the mentions of the lion and the lamb are actually found in Revelations, in common parlance when we put the two together it’s generally a misquotation of Isaiah “and the [lion] will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the young goat… and a little child will lead them”. We need the ferocious lion parts of ourselves and the gentle lamb parts of ourselves to come together in harmony to reach fulfilment. This is no longer about taming a beast out there – it’s about loving what’s fierce and protecting what’s tender inside yourself. Can you allow the parts of you that snarl and the parts that tremble to coexist without one devouring the other? This card doesn’t ask us to choose between confidence and compassion. It says: “You are both. You are more. Be the shepherd of your own wild.”

In Le Tarot aux Ramures Étranges the figure of the maiden reaches out to hold hands with her own monstrous reflection. Jessica Dore writes that for her this card is about exactly this: extending a hand to yourself – showing self-compassion. It’s about learning to love ourselves even when we encounter the things about ourselves we don’t like, our flaws and our failings. Willpower and brute force (think Chariot energy!) can’t overcome internal barriers like anxiety, shame, self-doubt, or desire. Attempts to outrun, suppress, or destroy these parts of ourselves often end in exhaustion and despair. “But when we learn to honour the humanity in these difficult experience – anger, grief, loneliness, despair, guilt, shame – we discover that they cannot ‘kill’ us, nor can they pull us from our paths. We honour them by paying our respects, summoning willingness, being curious, and engaging in a genuine desire to understand.”  Maddy Elruna echoes this beautifully: “this is a card of passive strength, finding the time to be kind to yourself – [and] sometimes stopping is the most powerful choice you can make”.

This idea of honouring rather than denying the shadow self connects directly to what Bakara Wintner describes as Strength’s relationship to wildness: “We cannot and should not rid ourselves of our wildness, to do so would flatline life itself.” But this card doesn’t invite chaos – it offers us a chance to hold our wildness with care. We’re no longer at its mercy; we’re enriched because of it. This kind of strength, Wintner writes, “files off the jagged edges of the instincts that would otherwise tear us apart.”

Writing this section got me thinking about ‘The Beast in Me’ by Johnny Cash as a kind of ‘anti’ Strength song – or rather a song about the shadow side of the Strength card.  Unlike the ‘feminine’ energy of the Strength card, ‘The Beast In Me’ is a very ‘masculine’ song, sung in Cash’s deep-throated, growly gravel voice, with little variation in tone but still that rich resigned sense of sorrow. And the lyrics are exactly what happens when you DON’T love the beast, but try to supress it.

The beast in me
Is caged by frail and fragile bars
Restless by day
And by night, rants and rages at the stars
God help the beast in me

The beast in me
Has had to learn to live with pain
And how to shelter from the rain
And in the twinkling of an eye
Might have to be restrained
God help the beast in me

Sometimes it tries to kid me
That it’s just a teddy bear
And even somehow manage to vanish in the air
And that is when I must beware
Of the beast in me

From ‘The Beast In Me’ by Johnny Cash

This is what Strength without integration looks like – the energy turned inward, locked up, misunderstood, half-feared and half – problematically! – romanticised. Here the beast isn’t met with understanding – it’s feared, suppressed, “restrained.” There’s no maiden, no loving gaze, no integration – just management, containment, shame. Even the teddy bear line (“sometimes, it tries to kid me / that it’s just a teddy bear”) is heartbreaking. Because without trust or affection, that softer self can’t flourish either. Getting through each day in this state of mind is not strength, but pure animal survival.

So I really like the below Strength cards that specifically highlight the breaking of chains – that emphasise the way to tame the beast is to release it. Of the 78 Magical Tarot card, the guidebook writes, “mice, messengers of the kingdom, come to rescue the beast, chopping at brambles with tiny swords and bandaging their wounds, the mice filled only with compassion and no fear.”

True Grit: What Strength really means in the Tarot

In Gabby Morris’ Grounded Wisdom Tarot, Strength becomes ‘The Root’, demonstrating the card’s anchoring power, its tenacity and resilience. Morris shows the message of the card as the slow, steady growth of an old tree. Deep and wide, its roots stretch patiently through the soil, wrapping themselves around stones, pushing through resistance, drawing nourishment from the darkness. Like the maiden and the lion, the tree doesn’t dominate its environment – it partners with it. Its strength lies in co-operation, not conquest.

Strength as a cactus putting forward a delicate flower in the midst of a barren looking desert is really smart. Carrie Mallon, the co-creator of the Spacious Tarot, writes, “Strength affirms that you can bloom delicately even if you find yourself in a harsh environment… The cactus lives in a dry environment, yet holds reserves of water within… You also have great reserves of gentle power… You are strong and compassionate – believe this, know this, and act accordingly”. It’s a quiet, enduring kind of strength, the kind that reminds us resilience doesn’t have to roar, like the traditional RWS lion. Sometimes, it simply blooms.

Another powerful expression of Strength can be found in the Cosmic Cycles Tarot, where the card shows someone in rehab, re-learning how to walk after a serious accident. Here, for once Strength isn’t just metaphorical – it’s muscle memory, it’s pain tolerance. Yet it’s also the fierce refusal to give up on yourself.

This image reminds us that Strength isn’t about never falling, it’s about what we do after the fall. It’s waking up every day and choosing, again and again, to believe in your own healing. To work with your body, not against it. To trust that progress doesn’t have to be fast to be meaningful (it makes total sense to me that the creators of the Cosmic Cycles explicitly identify the figure in their Strength card as the Knight of Pents!) Just like the maiden with the lion, the Knight here isn’t conquering anything, he’s building a relationship. With his limits. With his hope. With his will.

It’s a perfect mirror to the message I’ve been writing about throughout this post: that real strength isn’t domination. It’s devotion. It’s consistency. It’s saying, “I will meet myself here, as I am, and keep going.” As Taylor Ellis notes when writing about the Strength card, “our bodies can be weathered [and] broken… but if our steadfastness and willpower remain, the human spirit reveals itself as the source of our inner strength”.

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars”

Khalil Gibran

I get similar vibes from the Strength card in the Delta Enduring Tarot, with its depiction of its central figure, trans rights flag proudly on display, washing up while an anti-LGBT+ demonstration rages outside. There’s no sword drawn. No lion wrestled to the ground. Just a quiet refusal to be broken.

This, too, is Strength. Not the kind that seeks a fight, but the kind that says: I choose to live anyway. To wash my dishes. To dance in the kitchen. To continue becoming. In a world that tries to define you by fear, this kind of joyful persistence is radical. In this sense, Strength isn’t about ignoring pain, but about choosing your focus. It’s a spell of survival, cast in small, daily rituals. Headphones on. Coffee brewing. The world outside can rage – but in here, I am home.

Strength isn’t always soft. Sometimes it raises its fist. But it is always grounded in compassion.

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise…

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

From ‘Still I Rise’ by Maya Angelou

Serpent Wisdom: Strength and the Snake in Tarot

I said I was going to talk a bit about snake imagery in the Strength card, so here you go🐍!

The snake represents a very different kind of strength than the lion, and shows us that different situations call for different forms of power. The Hebrew letter assigned to the Strength card is ‘Teth’ meaning serpent, and the serpent’s strength is of the mind. Snakes tend to get a bad rap in Biblical texts, but on closer reading, I think their portrayal is more nuanced. In Genesis, the snake is described as more “crafty” or “cunning” than any other creature (not necessarily a bad thing!), and in the Gospels Jesus tells his followers to be “as wise as serpents, and as innocent as doves.”

As I wrote in my Lovers post, the serpent in Eden doesn’t have to be read solely as a deceiver. In mystical and feminist interpretations, it becomes a bringer of knowledge, of choice. In these readings Eve’s interaction with the serpent and her subsequent choice to eat the apple is not a failure, but a bold act of agency – the first step toward conscious, autonomous knowledge. Strength here becomes about owning one’s desires and making peace with shadow, not repressing it.

Snakes are creatures of transformation, shedding their skin to grow and regenerate. They don’t resist change, in fact they embody it. Strength-as-snake, then, calls us to shed our psychic skins, to release old patterns, and to let wisdom guide us when instinct alone won’t serve. That’s serpent wisdom, too: the courage not to flinch from transformation.

In yogic philosophy, the kundalini is a coiled serpent at the base of the spine – representing latent spiritual power. When awakened (through practice, discipline, breath, etc.), it rises upward through the chakras, bringing enlightenment or inner transformation. This aligns beautifully with Strength’s inner mastery – the tamed passions and disciplined energy rising through conscious intent, not brute force. This maps very well on to the WayHome Tarot‘s Strength card. That upward movement (from root to crown) is suggested by the snake’s head lifting, aligning with the evolution of inner strength and spiritual awakening, rather than brute force. The snake is also forming a lemniscate – so clever!  It’s Strength through integration, not opposition. You’re not slaying the beast – you’re loving it into alignment.

I have a soft spot for cards that show chimeras (half snake, half lion), and a REALLY soft spot for the Solara Occulto Meliora Tarot which shows not one, not two, but a combination of all three of the traditional symbols of ‘Strength’ (the maiden, the lion, the snake) merged into one chimera! Genius.

I think the snake works well for a card that’s about reconciling different parts of ourselves, because snakes themselves are multivalent: both healer and poison, temptation and wisdom, danger and regeneration. As a symbol on the Strength card, it shifts the focus slightly from external control (like the lion) to internal integration: the mastery of subtle energies, ancient instincts, and the transformation of “base” impulses into higher awareness. The serpent offers us strength not through the taming of the beast – but through knowing ourselves deeply enough to become one with the beast.

And finally here’s my favourite Strength card, from Eric Maille’s Ink Witch Tarot. The illustration is inspired by Bernie Boston’s iconic Flower Power photograph, which captures a young man placing flowers into the barrels of soldiers’ rifles during a protest against the Vietnam War. It’s a powerful image of resistance, not through violence, but through peaceful, deliberate vulnerability. Maille writes in the LWB that he was struck by the man’s “calm fearlessness,” and I think he captures that beautifully in this card.

To quote the artist, “there are many kinds of strength. This card represents the need for all of them. Most importantly, however, it is a reminder that physical brute strength pales in comparison to the inner strength or things like courage, compassion, patience, and control. Brute power, this card tells us, can never be stronger than strength of heart” ♥️. Amen to that, brother!

Strength FAQs

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Works Cited

Burgess, C. C. (2023). Radical Tarot: Queer the Cards, Liberate Your Practice and Create the Future. Hay House.
Cownie, J. & Lensvelt, F. (2022). Wild Card: Let the Tarot Tell Your Story. Bluebird.
Dore, J. (2021). Tarot for Change. Hay House.
Elruna, M. (2022). Tarot: A Life Guided by the Cards. Matador.
Waite, A.E. (1911). The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. William Rider & Son.
Wang, R. (1983). The Qabalistic Tarot Book: A Textbook of Mystical Philosophy. Red Wheel / Weiser.
Warner, M. (1995). From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers. Random House.
Wintner, B. (2017). WTF is Tarot? And How Do I Do It? Page Street Publishing.