Strength

The picture

A woman in a white gown bends over a red lion, both hands at its jaws — one below, one on top. Her expression is calm and faintly amused. A lemniscate turns above her head, the same sign the Magician carries.

She wears flowers in her hair, and a garland of roses runs from her waist, down, and around the lion's neck. The lion's head is bowed under her hands. Its tail is tucked between its legs. Behind them a green field, a blue hill, a yellow sky.

Upright

Power that works by patience, in a situation where force would only have made the animal worse.

Strength is the deck's quietest card about power and its most easily misapplied. Nothing here is beaten. The lion is fully intact, still a lion, still capable of everything a lion is capable of, and it has its head down anyway. What is happening is slower than domination and holds a great deal better.

The card is usually glossed as courage, and it is courage, of a specific and unpopular kind: the sort that declines to escalate. Anyone can meet force with force. The difficult thing is staying gentle while remaining completely immovable, and doing it for as long as it takes, not for as long as it stays satisfying.

The garland is a leash

It is often said of this card that the flowers are decoration and not a restraint. Look at where they go.

The roses leave her waist, cross the space between them, and close around the lion's neck. It is a continuous chain and it is fastened at both ends. Whatever else it is, it is a collar, and the woman is wearing the other end of it.

This makes the card better, not worse. Strength does not claim that the lion needs nothing holding it. It claims that what holds it can be made of something the animal does not resent, and that a restraint the lion accepts will outlast one it does not. The alternative — a chain — is two cards later, around two necks, in front of a black background.

The tail tucked between its legs is the other half of that. This is not a lion at peace. It is a lion deferring, which is a real state and a fragile one, and it has been achieved without a single mark on the animal.

Reversed

Patience exhausted, or never attempted at all. Force brought to bear on something that was only ever going to yield to gentleness, generally after a long period of gentleness that nobody acknowledged.

Self-command can also curdle here into self-suppression. The lion caged rather than calmed — the same animal, the same person, a very different arrangement, and a considerably less stable one. Cages hold until they do not.

In a reading

As advice this card counsels against the confrontation the reader has already half-planned, and it is generally right, which does not make it welcome. In an outcome position it says the situation gets handled slowly and without a scene, and that nobody will be able to point at the moment it turned.

The Chariot makes the instructive contrast. Beside the Devil the question becomes which appetite is being lived with instead of fought — and the presence of the garland in one card and the chain in the other is most of the answer.