For You to See Life - 4u2c.life

Strength ~ symbolic meanings painted in the card.

The card of Strength portrays a muscular, powerfully built man with curling chestnut hair, wearing only a red loincloth. He is engaged in a savage struggle with a lion, and has managed to wrap his strong hands around the beast’s throat; at the critical moment he is winning the fight. Around man and lion loom the rocky walls of a dark cave.

Through the mouth of the cave can be seen a barren landscape of brown hills. The lion can only be conquered with bare hands; there are no man-made tools or shortcuts, but only one’s own resources.

The darkness of the cave is like the darkness of the unconscious in which the primitive instincts dwell, invisible to ordinary awareness.

Heracles wears the blood-red colour of Ares, whom we met in the card of the Chariot, because he has already learned the lesson of harnessing his aggression and directing it toward a creative end.

Major Arcana ~ Strength

Here we meet the great warrior Heracles, called Hercules by the Romans, who in myth was the most invincible of heroes. He was the son of Zeus, king of the gods, by a mortal woman called Alcmene. Zeus’ wife Hera was, as usual, jealous of the child bom from her husband’s adultery, and persecuted the hero with terrible punishments. She drove him mad, and in his madness he inadvertently murdered his wife and children.

Heracles begged the gods tor some task to expiate his crimes, and the oracle at Delphi ordered him to subject himself to twelve years of arduous labours in the service of the evil King Eurystheus, whom Hera favoured. Thus the hero voluntarily bound himself to the servant of the goddess who persecuted him m expiation of a crime for which she was ultimately responsible.

The first of the famous Twelve Labours which King Eurystheus required Heracles to perform was the conquest of the Nemean Lion, an enormous beast with a pelt that was proof against iron, bronze and stone. Since the lion had depopulated the neighbourhood, Heracles could find no one who could direct him to its lair. Eventually he found the beast, bespattered with blood from the day’s slaughter. He shot a flight of arrows at it, but they rebounded harmlessly from the thick pelt. Next he used his sword, which bent, and then his club, which shattered on the lion s head. Heracles then netted one entrance of the two-mouthed cave in which the lion hid, and crept in by the other entrance. The lion bit off one of his fingers, but Heracles managed to catch hold of its neck and choked it to death with his bare hands. Then he flayed the pelt of the lion with its own razor-sharp claws, and forever after wore the skin as armour with the head as a helmet, thus becoming as invincible as was the beast itself.

On an inner level, Heracles battling the Nemean Lion is an image of the problem of containing the powerful and savage beast within us, while still preserving those animal qualities which are creative and vital. The lion is a special kind of beast, and reflects a different aspect of the human psyche than do the wilful horses in the card of the Chariot. The lion in myth has always been associated with royalty, even when it is at its most destructive, and this king of beasts is an image of the infantile, savage and totally egocentric beginnings of a unique individuality. Thus the Nemean Lion is not wholly evil, but possesses a magical skin which can offer invincibility. This invincibility is connected with the sense of inner permanence which comes from a solid sense of‘me’. When we wear the skin of the lion which we have conquered, the opinions of others - the great They who strike such fear into the hearts of the timid - mean little, for we are armoured in our own indestructible sense of identity.

However promising its potential, the lion is savage and vicious in its animal form. This side of a person unleashed is the ‘me first’ drive which will happily destroy anyone or anything in its path, so long as one’s own gratification is assured. Rage is one of the manifestations of this drive - not healthy anger which might be appropriate to a situation, but a furious, explosive, floor-beating tantrum when we do not get our way. Implacable pride is another of its faces - not self-respect, but a bombast and inflated self-importance which can make us savage and unrelenting toward those upon whom we are dependent or who steal the limelight from us.

The lion is in many ways like the angry infant in us, demanding that the world revolve around oneself, and destroying blindly and at random when it does not. But if this beast is conquered, then we can appropriate the magical skin, which in psychological terms means integrating the vital power of the beast and making it serve a conscious and responsible ego. Thus Heracles’ conquest of the lion is not truly a killing, but a kind of transformation, so that the strength and determination of the animal are expressed by a human and not a beast.

Herein lies the ambivalence of the card of Strength, for Heracles could easily simply destroy the beast without any benefit accruing from the slaughter. This is the negative face of Heracles within us: the kind of strength which represses all instinct without any transformation, leaving behind a strong shell within which lives a soul without passion, without anger, and without a true identity.

On a divinatory level, the card of Strength, when it appears in a spread, implies a situation where a collision with the lion within is inevitable, and where a creative handling of one’s own rage and senseless pride is desirable. Courage, strength and self-discipline are necessary to battle with the situation. Through such an experience we can come in contact with the beast, but also with that part of us which is Heracles, the hero who can subdue it. Thus the Fool, having developed the faculties of mind and feeling, now learns to deal with his own ferocious egotism, emerging from this contest with trust in himself and integrity toward others.

I will explain in my readings what each card means, this is a general interpritation taken from the Mythic Tarot Deck

Information Source: Mythic Tarot Deck
[published in 1986 by Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene and Illustrated by Tricia Newell (not the New Mythic Tarot)]