In my personal opinion, The Strength card (Major Arcana
number 8) is one of the most beautiful cards in the entire Tarot deck. When I
look at it, I can’t help but feel a message of peace, hope and true balance.
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| Anna K Tarot - Strength Card |
The Strength card is almost always depicted as a young woman
controlling a powerful lion through gentle domination. She is not forcing her
will on the animal through brute strength. Rather, the lion is bowing down to
her because he recognizes a power much greater than his own– even though he has
the ability to destroy her if he wanted to.
That seemingly intangible power is what makes the Strength
card so beautiful.
Looking at this card, you can see how mesmerized the lion is
when he looks into the eyes of the fair maiden. He may offer a growl, but the
ferocity is more hot air than true anger.
What is equally impressive is the depth of the expression in
the eyes of the young woman. She seems to understand the source of the lion’s frustration.
Her look is one of patience, love and understanding. Rather than show anger in
the face of anger, she shows love. She is like a mother soothing a frightened child
who is lashing out.
And that is what the lion in the Strength card represents –
our ego-based fears. He is the externalization of our weaker self. His focus is
completely on earthly experiences. He contains great power, but struggles to
use it correctly. He represents the earthly human who forgot about his divine
origin.
The young woman represents our higher self. She is our inner
guide – the one who reminds us that no outer circumstance can destroy who we
truly are. She works to calm the savage beast we call our ego. Her goal is to remind
us of our real essence.
What I love most about this card is the message it offers.
This card tells us that we are both the maiden and the lion. At our strongest
we operate from the point of view of the young woman. She is the ‘queen’ of our
inner world. When we connect with this energy, we are in touch with ourselves
and don’t feel the need to control our outer world to bring inner peace. At our
weaker moments we are the lion. We may growl and threaten because we feel our
outer world is under attack. This, in turn, disrupts our inner world.
The trick here is to live in the space between these two
extremes. We need to experience the earthly domain with all its pleasures and
pains in order to grow as spiritual beings. After all, that is why we came here.
We can’t forget this
However, the real message of the Strength card mimics the
age-old message of good versus evil; darkness versus light; Cain versus Abel.
The Strength card hints at the idea of our power being directly connected to
our ability to find a balance in our opposites.
We were born with a mind for a reason. It is our mind and
our physical body that allows us to enjoy all the beautiful sensations we came
to earth to experience. We must be careful though not to mistakenly believe
that this visible dimension – the things we process with our mind - is all
there is to experience on earth. When that happens, our ego takes over and
causes us to seek a greater connection with the creations of the earth.
This
causes an imbalance that skews our spiritual focus.
The Strength card reminds us that the only power strong
enough to conquer the ego and silence the inner beast is love – love of self
and others. This love is the only way we can uncover the spiritual courage and
wisdom needed to differential between
our ego-driven desires (the lion energy) and our higher-level desires (the
maiden energy). In addition, the card is
not asking us to “fight fire with fire” per se. Rather, it is asking us to show
kindness and gentleness when acknowledging our weaknesses – much like a mother
would when interacting with a small child - because we must realize this is the
true intellectual capacity of the ego.
The card actually warns us that by using aggression to
conquer aggression we pretty much guarantee the escalation of hostility.
To grow spiritually, we must embrace this mother energy when
dealing with our own shortcomings and those of others. It does not mean we
accept poor behavior or erroneous thinking. Rather, we calmly acknowledge the
issues and behavior. We offer our understanding of the behavior without
condoning it. We accept that such happenings are the in the nature of a
physical human being, but offer the reminder that we are not here to simply
exist as the average lower-energy animal does. With that, we focus on the Light
that exists within each person, and we attempt to turn ourselves and others in
the direction of this higher, more genuine source of existence.
