Strength: Wild, Fierce, Calm, Resolute.
A Journey through the Tarot Major Arcana: Strength ~ Card 8
Thanks for joining me on my quest to renew my tarot practice by taking a journey through the cards of the Major Arcana. This is the ninth post in the series, which is an offering for paid subscribers. We focus mainly on the Gaian Tarot and the Herbcrafter’s Tarot in this series, which includes a look at the card’s themes, card comparisons, creative sparks and crafts, journal prompts, and songs inspired by the themes of the card. These posts are longer than most of mine. Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear your responses in the comments.
“The Strength card is about what we do with our personal power — the fire energy that is the source of our passion, which leads us to where we can shine in life.”
— Lane Smith, 78 Acts of Liberation: Tarot to Transform Our World
“A healthy woman is much like a wolf: robust, chock-full, strong life force, life-giving, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving. … When women reassert their relationship with the wildish nature, they are gifted with a permanent and internal watcher, a knower, a visionary, an oracle, an inspiratrice, an intuitive, a maker, a creator, and inventor, and a listener who guide, suggest, and urge vibrant life in the inner and outer worlds.”
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves
“The resilient Strength character is gently powerful in evoking the best out of themselves and their comrades. They don’t steamroll; they collaborate. Their power isn’t rigid or controlling; it’s empathetic.”
— Maria Minnis, Tarot for the Hard Work: An Archetypal Journey to Confront Racism and Inspire Collective Healing
The Strength card is multi-faceted, like so many Major Arcana cards. It’s about the inner strength and resiliency that is generated by making it through difficult times. It’s about uncovering and unleashing your instinctual “wildish nature” as Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes in Women Who Run with the Wolves. It’s about becoming comfortable with your own personal power. It’s about being lit on fire by your creative passions and warming others with your radiance. It is most definitely about “power-with” or collaboration; it’s not about “power-over,” even though older decks do underscore the dominator mindset that pervades Western culture by showing Hercules fighting a lion.
Sometimes people (including me) groan when Strength shows up in a reading, because honestly, who wants another dang growth opportunity? Who wants to sign up for difficulties and challenges in order to develop inner fortitude? Not too many of us.
Yet here we are, every day, facing challenges. And the Strength card is one of our most trusted allies in learning how to meet them.