Major Arcana · 8
Strength Tarot Card Meaning
What the card shows
A woman calmly closes a lion’s jaw with her bare hands.
Upright meaning
Not through force, through steadiness. Upright, Strength is the kind of courage that outlasts a fight: patience with a hard situation instead of a burst of aggression toward it.
If it's your card today
If something is testing your patience, this card says stay soft and stay firm at the same time.
Commentary and alternative readings by context
Love and relationships
In love, Strength suggests handling a difficult relationship dynamic with patience and calm rather than force — steady support over confrontation.
Work and decisions
For career, it points to persistence through a hard situation, succeeding through steadiness rather than aggression or shortcuts.
As a person
Strength describes quiet courage: someone who can meet frustration without making it everyone else's problem. Their gentleness has backbone; patience is most useful when it includes honest limits.
Reversed meaning
Self-doubt, or force used where patience would have worked better.
Where Tarot schools disagree
The main interpretation follows Rider–Waite–Smith. The Marseille and Thoth comparisons are attributed to named authors and works.
Strength Tarot Card: Tarot de Marseille Interpretation
Tarot de Marseille — La Force (Paul Marteau, 1949)
In Paul Marteau's named system in Le Tarot de Marseille (1949), La Force represents deep conscience weighing acts, balance, and their consequences. This is a specific twentieth-century interpretation, not an ancient meaning shared by every Marseille reader.
Strength Tarot Card: Crowley’s Interpretation in The Book of Thoth (1944)
Thoth — Lust, Atu XI (Aleister Crowley, 1944)
Crowley's exact corresponding card in The Book of Thoth (1944) is Lust, Atu XI. Crowley renamed this card "Lust" — deliberately provocative, and by his own account not about appetite but about the full-blooded, ecstatic embrace of vital force, in contrast to Waite's gentler "mastery of the animal self." He kept the Hebrew letter Teth and the sign Leo used across the wider system.
Why the interpretations differ
Rider–Waite–Smith, Paul Marteau’s Marseille method and Crowley’s Thoth use different symbolic grammars. They may point to the same broad theme, but they reach it through different images, arcana order, correspondences and authorial systems. The differences above are therefore differences of method, not competing claims about one fixed universal meaning.
Sources and method
A. E. Waite — The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) · Paul Marteau — Le Tarot de Marseille (BnF, 1949) · Marteau — attributed English translation · Aleister Crowley — The Book of Thoth (1944)
Automated factual and language passes completed 23 September 2026; no human native-language review is claimed.
Fire
Leo
Frequently asked
What does the Tarot card “Strength” mean upright?
Not through force, through steadiness. Upright, Strength is the kind of courage that outlasts a fight: patience with a hard situation instead of a burst of aggression toward it.
What does the Tarot card “Strength” mean reversed?
Self-doubt, or force used where patience would have worked better.
What does the Tarot card “Strength” mean in love?
In love, Strength suggests handling a difficult relationship dynamic with patience and calm rather than force — steady support over confrontation.
What does the Tarot card “Strength” mean for career?
For career, it points to persistence through a hard situation, succeeding through steadiness rather than aggression or shortcuts.
What kind of person does the Tarot card “Strength” describe?
As a person, this card describes the same pattern in character: Not through force, through steadiness. Upright, Strength is the kind of courage that outlasts a fight: patience with a hard situation instead of a burst of aggression toward it. Under pressure, its shadow may look like this: Self-doubt, or force used where patience would have worked better.
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