VIII Strength
Invitations
Crystal ally: Grape Agate
Plant ally: Baby’s breath, chrysanthemum
Animal ally: Lion family
Dating Strength: Go to a dance performance, scream in your car, journal about your inner beast and what animal they might be. Adopt a pet from your local shelter.
Dating Strength is about getting soft and then getting even softer with the hardest parts of you. Your inner beasts. The more you melt the closer you are to strength, because it takes the most strength to allow the vulnerability and trust around, that could historically get you killed.
Keywords
Upright: Fortitude, willpower, grace, magnanimity, patience, endurance, gentle fierceness
Reversed: Brutish, rushing, conquesting, force
Card Analysis
A lioness demands the attention of the querent while a dancer offers her visibly strong heart. You can almost feel the magic of interspecies interconnectedness weaving, limniscate between them. Over, cross, down, cross and back, generating a language of understanding, available to those open to communing with their inner wild.
A Dancer’s Pride
The dance begins before I know I am dancing. It starts when I am in the audience. When I am a kitten mewling for milk.
My dear friend flew in from New Orleans to see me perform tonight. I can almost feel her sincere gaze more than I feel my own fluttering heart. The lights come up.
I will dance tonight, like I do every night and then we will drink wine and lounge over my couches with a couple other girlfriends until the bottles are empty or the sun peaks its head over the skyline.
The music moves my body across the stage, a lavender dress nips at my heels. I crave my Pride of women more when I am going through a break up. The empathetic heckling and the animal sense that there is safety in numbers. A pack of lionesses is not something you walk kindly upon. You approach with submission.
I will dance the power of submission all over the stage tonight. More so than other nights because of the need to convey a feeling without words, to share a broken heart without explaining why. I will become vulnerable to the beast inside me. I will not pet his head or crouch, inviting play.
I will smear my heart across the sky for him and devote my gushy insides to his restraint. I can’t see her in the audience, but I know she is roaring for me, tears streaming down her face. The flecks of glittering dust vortex through the stage lights as I come to stillness and the music fades to silence.
I am strong for her and make it through the performance by fantasizing about her licking my eyebrows into place, her fingers speaking tender poetry into the strands of my mane, my growl and purr honored and matched.
“There is more to cultivating your inner lion than practicing your roar.”
Creating these arts has become part of this blogging practice, loving it. Shout out to my friend Michelle for turning me onto the practice.
Golden Dawn moved Strength
I learned to read with a Rider Waite Smith deck, that is why I use them in my picture for these blogs. This hermetic order took liberties with Strength. Historically, Strength is the eleventh card of the major arcana, Golden Dawn switched it with Justice, the original eight. It is said they did this so the cards would better align with their astrological associations.
I currently don’t have qualms with this move, as I don’t have qualms with any reimagining of the tarot because it is a living, shifting, growing game. I do think it is important to mention though, out of respect to the history of the cards.
Know This
The strength card is a great opportunity to pull your querent into their own intuition by asking,
“Whom do you feel best represents you right now, the human or the lion?”
If they replied “human”
Collaboration with your inner beast creates an active environment for fierce unconditional love. Be tender and understanding of your inner beast and that same tenderness will shine through in your worldly dilemmas. Replace fear with love and see the doors of opportunity open.
If they replied “lion”
It is not always about humans, sometimes the main character is not human, sometimes it is the lion. Yes, the woman is a display of brave gentleness but the lion is a beacon of restraint, of extreme harmony with unreliable collaborators. We are talking about the embodiment of strength here, the lion. There is an invitation to rage here, let your inner wild take over and then when you are ready, remember your restraint. Both of these things are available to the querent identifying with the lion. The inner beast or predator is the archetypal lesson here, harness your incredible power and wield it with sheer wistfulness.
“I was just trying to be brave, like you.”
“I am only brave when I have to be.”