The Spiritual Meaning of the Strength Tarot Card

The Strength tarot card classically depicts a young woman gently closing a lion’s mouth. The lion looks up at the woman with trust and adoration, not a hint of danger in the picture. The lion has a mane, indicating that he is male, and the woman in the image is unquestionably feminine. She wears a flower crown, is dressed in white, and often has other plants and flowers around her. Some versions of this card alternatively depict a woman who is half lion herself.

Generally, this card represents inner strength, patience, and tolerance. But what’s the deeper spiritual meaning of the Strength tarot card?

Many tarot readers note the contradiction between the card’s name and the image it depicts. When we hear the word strength, we often think of brawn, big muscles, and an ability to win a physical fight or lift something heavy. But we don’t see any of those qualities depicted in this card. The woman is very gentle with the lion, who is often sitting with her or even cuddling her. He hasn’t been tamed with violence. He trusts the woman.

Strength is usually the eighth card in the major arcana, with the number eight being an indicator of stability and structure in the Tarot. The number eight is also very similar to the lemniscate, the infinity symbol, which is often depicted hovering over the woman’s head in this card. There’s something cozy about the number eight in the Tarot, something contained and protected. But sometimes its stable structure can feel a little too tight, a little too restrictive, and we find ourselves with an urge to move, to change, and maybe to listen to the wild nature that is inviting us to shift out of what’s been comfortable when we pull an eight card.

Leonine Fierceness

Eight is also the number associated with the astrological sign of Leo—the lion, of course. This sign is related to the element of fire. The constellation of Leo was especially important in ancient Egypt, as it rose in the sky during the annual flooding of the Nile River, allowing for the crops to be irrigated.

The Egyptians worshiped Sekhmet, a goddess with the head of a lion, who represented the fire of the sun and the heat of desert winds, as well as war and healing. While Sekhmet is generally understood as a fierce goddess, she also knows how to use fire to heal. We can see her here in the Strength card: powerful enough to easily hold the energies of fierceness at bay, and ready to use them when needed.

Befriending Our Innate Wildness

Some see the infinity symbol on this card as a symbol of spiritual connection, while the lion represents our wildness and our base instincts. Our spirituality, in this interpretation, “tames” our wildness.

In a story found in the apocryphal text The Acts of Paul and Thecla, a young woman named Thecla decides to follow Paul and his teachings about Christ rather than get married. When she is nearly raped in the street, she gets in trouble with the law for resisting and is sentenced to execution by wild animals. She is bound to a lion and presented to several other wild animals, but the lion protects her. Thecla became a beloved saint in the Christian tradition for some time.

Thecla’s story is about the power of faith and virtue over wildness and cruelty. Thecla prevails because of who she is and what she believes; because of her inner strength and purpose rather than physical strength.

In this story, the lion understands something about Thecla that the people around her don’t. With their wild nature, non-human animals may be able to access knowledge we can’t, through the same senses and instincts that we humans sometimes forget. Maybe it’s not that we need to “tame” our wild instincts, but that we need to befriend them, get to know them, let them help us. With Strength, we are invited to get to know the wild part of ourselves that knows and feels; that is connected to instinct and can sense who is safe and who is not just by sniffing them out.

When Strength appears in a reading, this may be an invitation to notice the wild instincts we sometimes suppress and ignore. If we let our wildness teach us something, what would it have to say? If we invite our primal, base instincts into the world of our spirituality, what could we have the capacity to heal?

Tarot can offer us support during dark times. Learn how.