Strength Tarot Card Meaning

Strength upright

Strength says you have the capacity to face life, especially a hard problem or a time of change, with hope and zest. You are strong from within: you live your passions intensely but peacefully, without being dominated or swept away by them. You find the strength to start or continue a difficult project despite fear and emotional tension. This card speaks of courage, energy, power that moves into action, patience, perseverance and endurance.

This strength does not seek to dominate others. You build self-confidence by discovering your inner power rather than by exerting power over other people. It stands against the ego's will to control: it is the strength to look at yourself calmly and without fear. The feelings, fears, desires and confusions your ego set aside to keep control can then come back up. They come back with peace, love of life and great trust in the outcome. Letting your deep emotions out with love and faith in life takes as much courage as strength, and intuition and spontaneous emotion are not weakness.

Your instincts, desires and raw energy are part of you. They are not bad in themselves: they form an available force that can become destructive when left without direction. Your conscious side can order them, direct them and transform them. This mastery comes from gentleness and subtlety, which work better than anger and brute force. It joins reason and feeling to bring instinct under control, and it makes for moral energy, calm and fearlessness. The strength here is steadiness, endurance and moral stability, never violence. The card also carries the joy of exercising your strength: the vigor and pleasure it gives, great passion.

When you have willpower and the right on your side, you can get the better of what happens to you. What frightened you and what you took for an adversary can become an ally once you understand it, and the card then gives courage and confidence. Set beside the Chariot, it shows a different kind of power from the force of will. It lets you act with power while staying calm.

Your strengths

You hold firm over the long term, with endurance and firmness of character. You know how to listen to, encourage and support others. You can soothe a loved one's pain or rage with love and gentle understanding. You know how to combine passionate commitment with gentle support, which helps you get through a crisis calmly and with confidence. Your passion for life and your courage to commit your heart give you the power to express your creative and vital abilities. Your sexual energy can drive a creative transformation.

What holds you back

Your impulses, when you do not direct them, push you to take everything for yourself and to destroy out of selfishness.
Your criticism, when misdirected, scatters and weakens instead of enlightening.
If you live everything under strict control, you experience your passions as a torment and your inner world as something to crush.
If you try to transform yourself by reason alone, you build yourself another facade: you imitate spontaneity instead of freeing what you hold back.
Letting go of control and success to move toward your deep emotions feels hard.

What helps

Accepting and respecting your instincts, even if they seem wild and frightening: they give you courage, confidence and patience.
Turning what is base in you into useful energy rather than crushing it.
When your urges are strong, directing them with your intelligence and will.
Using gentleness rather than anger.
Staying silent when your words would hurt and speaking truly when they can support.
Facing what frightens you: a problem is not solved by refusing to see it.
Taking other people's selfishness into account instead of demanding selflessness from them.
Believing that discovering yourself is a joyful experience, without which you would not carry it through.

Strength reversed

Strength represents your ability to face life with courage and to guide your impulses rather than be ruled by them. Reversed, it points first to weakness: you lack the courage to face life, you feel overwhelmed and pessimistic. You are going through inner torment. The instinctive part of you splits away from the unity of mind and senses, and your passions become an enemy that threatens the personality you have built.

You may be afraid of your passions, your impulses and your instincts. Or, the other way around, you may be too bold and reckless. You may be living an inner division between your intellect and your instincts, between what is cultivated and what is raw. When your heart is not in what you are doing, you cannot hold out under testing. You may also feel crushed by forces beyond your control.

Your personal strength can go in two opposite directions. You may use it to dominate or subdue others. Or you may be timid and submissive, like an animal that has been beaten. The card can therefore indicate that you are in the process of establishing a pecking order with someone. It may stay a game of jostling, or turn cruel.

Your passions may get away from you, or on the contrary be stifled and denied for no good reason. Suppressed feelings then come out at the wrong moment. The card also speaks of failure, cowardice, personal weakness and lack of endurance. It also speaks of haste, excessive pride and overblown will. You may overestimate your abilities, take on impossible obstacles and dig in when it would be better to stop. You may also do nothing at all because you fear handling the situation badly. You may become inconstant, changeable and unfaithful. It also speaks of anger, cruelty, impatience and difficulty resisting temptation.

It can also signal that you are letting something slip: not only a secret told by accident, but a force you should have kept contained and could not hold back.

When you project this force onto others, you see them as emotional or controlling. You may feel they are trying to keep you under their grip. You may fear or admire a person's power and domination.

At bottom, the card is about a balance between mind and body. You find your moral courage by drawing on both freely and equally. You may be listening very closely to what your body says. This card can also mark the awakening of your own power, for better or for worse.

Your strengths

What the card names on the positive side: your personal power can awaken, and you can find moral courage by bringing your body and mind together. You listen to what your body tells you.

What holds you back

You are afraid of your passions, impulses or instincts, or you throw yourself into them too boldly.
You feel overwhelmed and pessimistic, and you lack the courage to face things.
You are divided between your intellect and your instincts.
You give up when your heart is not in it.
You swing between dominating others and submitting.
You stifle your feelings, and then they come out at the wrong moment.
You overestimate your abilities and dig in, or you do nothing for fear of doing it wrong.
You can be impatient, angry and give in to temptation.

What helps

Seeking balance between your mind and your body, and drawing on both equally to find moral courage. Listening to what your body says. Do not dig in your heels when it would be better to stop.

What the card shows

What the image shows

A woman holds a lion's jaws, calmly and with no visible effort. She does not strike it or try to destroy it: she holds it. The lion is already tamed and led by a chain of flowers. The woman's belt of flowers forms a second infinity sign, with one loop around her waist and the other around the lion's neck. Above her head, she wears the same infinity sign as the Magician, a horizontal eight. This sign expresses continuous movement. Her hat carries a crown and feathers, while the Magician's is plainer. The woman is blond and sensual, which brings her close to the Empress. Her dress is blue and her cloak red, like the High Priestess's; the blue is a clear azure, like the Empress's, and green appears in her sleeves.

The lion

The lion stands for vital power, instinct, desire and raw energy. It is not bad in itself: it is an available force, which becomes devouring when left to itself. It also stands for all the feelings, fears, desires and confusions that the ego represses to keep control of its life. More broadly, it stands for the whole strength of the personality, which the demands of life in society tend to soften and hide. Tamed, it does great service to the one who knows how to direct it. That is why the card does not ask you to kill the animal, even in yourself: dangerous energies exist to be captured, then used with discernment. In alchemy, the lion corresponds to gold, the sun and sulfur, and the passage from sulfur to gold is the transformation of the low into the high. The lion has also stood for Christ, the radiant power of God.

The woman

The woman stands for the consciousness that knows how to order, direct and transform this energy. She exercises a calm, steady and conscious authority. Her power is feminine and more irresistible in its gentleness than anger and brute force. She is the higher nature set free, the one that rules the passions. She unites the strength of the Magician, who directs his awareness, and the sensuality of the Empress, which thus receives a purpose. She stands in contrast to the Chariot: her strength is not the ego's will, it is the inner strength to look at yourself calmly and without fear. The Chariot shows control and reason; Strength shows intuition and spontaneous emotion, and freeing your deep emotions with love and trust takes as much courage as strength.

What the card means

Strength is the art of channeling your energy well. Human energy is always at work; everything depends on the use you make of it: it can build or destroy, sustain or exhaust itself in opposition. In medieval art, Strength is a virtue of constancy, endurance and moral stability: the soul prevails over instinct by governing it, without destroying it. Strength is one of the cardinal virtues, the one that helps calm your fears and moderate your boldness so as to face dangers reasonably. The card speaks of mastery, moral strength and organic strength. It does not come from ordinary self-confidence, but from the confidence of someone who finds her support in God. It also touches the strength that comes from contemplation. It shows power from within, while the Chariot exercises power over others. It marks a threshold in the sequence of cards: it is no longer about fleeing movement, but about transforming it from within. It frees the energy of the passions while calming it; it directs it instead of letting it take you where it wants. You go through it with a feeling of peace, love of life and great confidence in the outcome. An opposing force that you understand can become your ally and help you express yourself.

Your strengths

You have courage, calm and patience in the face of what frightens you.
You have perseverance and endurance in a difficult problem.
You live your passions intensely without being swept away by them.
You approach a change or a trial with hope and with eagerness.
You know how to listen to and support others, soothing a sorrow or an anger with tenderness and understanding.
You know when to keep quiet, because words can hurt, and when to speak with accuracy.

What holds you back

You can be afraid of your passions, your urges or your instincts, or on the contrary be too bold.
You can feel overwhelmed by forces you do not control.
You may no longer find the courage to face life, and feel crushed and pessimistic.
You can experience your passions as a threat to the life you have built.
You can use your strength to dominate others, or on the contrary be shy and submissive.
You can repress your feelings until they come out at the wrong moment.
You can overestimate your abilities and dig in when it would be better to stop.
You can stay stuck from fear of doing wrong, or become inconstant.
You can imitate other people's spontaneity instead of letting out your own hidden fears and desires.

What helps

Accept and respect your instincts, even if they are wild and frightening: they give you courage, confidence, patience and perseverance.
Direct your urges with your intelligence and your will.
Combine passionate commitment with gentle guidance and loving direction to get through a crisis calmly.
Let the feelings and desires you have kept hidden come, calmly and without fear.
Put your energy into what needs to grow rather than into comparison, bitterness or contestation.
Lean on gentleness rather than anger.
Believe that discovering yourself can be a joyful experience.