Strength

In love, intimacy and sexual-energy readings, Strength is the card of tender power: desire met with gentleness rather than control.

Strength in a love reading represents patience, gentle power, and the courage to be vulnerable. When this card appears in questions about romance or partnership, it signals a relationship that requires compassion over force, the taming of fears through trust, and intimacy built on quiet confidence rather than control.

Look at her hand on the lion's jaw. She is not gripping. She is not forcing the mouth closed. She is not wrestling the animal to the ground. She is opening the jaw, gently, with a touch so light it could almost be a caress.

This is the image that the Tarot has been carrying for six hundred years, and most of us have been reading it backward. We see the card and think: control your passions. Tame the beast. Rise above desire. But look again. She is not controlling the lion. She is meeting it. Her hands are bare. Her body is unarmored. The garland of roses draped between them is not a leash. It is an offering.

The Strength card teaches something that most discussions of love and intimacy fail to say clearly: the deepest form of strength in relationship is not the ability to suppress what you feel, but the willingness to remain open to it. To stand before the full force of your own desire, your own animal nature, your own hunger for touch and closeness and being known, and instead of clenching your jaw, to open it. To let yourself be seen in the act of wanting.

This is not the kind of strength that builds walls. It is the kind that takes them down.

To understand Strength in love, we have to listen to several streams at once: the long visual history of a woman and a lion, from medieval virtue allegory to Crowley's radical renaming of the card to Lust; Carl Jung's work on the integration of instinct and the shadow; the Kabbalistic teaching of Teth, the serpent coiled between mercy and severity; and the psychology of erotic surrender, where vulnerability becomes the truest form of power. What follows is an exploration of what this card means when love is the question.

The Lion as Libido: Jung and the Integration of Instinct

In Carl Jung's analytical psychology, the Strength card enacts one of the central dramas of the individuation process: the encounter between the conscious self and its own instinctual nature.

Jung distinguished sharply between suppression and integration of instinct. Suppression pushes the instinct into the unconscious, where it does not disappear but grows stronger, more distorted, and more likely to erupt in destructive ways. Integration means acknowledging the instinct, engaging with it consciously, and finding a way to incorporate its energy into the whole personality. The woman in the Strength card is performing integration. She has not chained the lion. She has not caged it. She has placed her bare hands on its jaw and is looking directly into it.

Jung wrote that the shadow, the repository of everything we have rejected about ourselves, is the first great encounter on the path to wholeness. He described it as "the 'apprentice-piece' in the individual's development." The shadow contains not only our darkest impulses but also our unlived vitality, our suppressed desires, our creative energy that was deemed unacceptable by family, culture, or our own frightened ego. The lion in the Strength card is this shadow given a body: golden, powerful, alive, and not inherently evil. It is only dangerous when denied.

The encounter with the anima (the unconscious feminine principle in a man's psyche) or animus (the unconscious masculine principle in a woman's psyche) is what Jung called "the masterpiece." On the Strength card, we see this encounter depicted: the feminine figure (anima) engaging directly with the beast (shadow, instinct). The anima does not fight the shadow. She tames it through presence, through the quality of her attention, through the willingness to remain soft in the face of something fierce. This is the exact mechanism by which Jung said unconscious material is integrated: not by force of will, but by sustained, compassionate awareness.

For love readings, this Jungian framework carries a specific teaching. When Strength appears, it often indicates that the querent is encountering their own shadow in the mirror of relationship. The partner who triggers your deepest reactions, who brings up your jealousy, your possessiveness, your fear of abandonment, your hunger for control, is showing you the lion. And the card's teaching is not to suppress those reactions or to pretend they do not exist. It is to meet them the way the woman meets the lion: with open hands, with steady presence, without flinching.

Beauty and the Beast: The Archetype of Transformative Love

The Strength card is the Tarot's version of the oldest love story in Western culture: Beauty and the Beast.

The tale we know today descends primarily from Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve's 1740 novel and Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont's shortened 1756 version. But its roots reach much further: to the Roman myth of Cupid and Psyche (from Apuleius's The Golden Ass, 2nd century CE), where a mortal woman must love an unseen god in the dark; to the Norwegian "East of the Sun and West of the Moon," where a girl's curiosity about her bear-husband triggers a quest for redemption; and to dozens of other folk tales across cultures where love between a human and a beast leads to transformation.

The Jungian reading of this archetype is precise. The Beast represents the shadow: the part of the psyche that has been rejected, distorted, made monstrous by its exile from consciousness. Beauty represents the anima: the soul quality that can see past the monstrous exterior to the essential nature beneath. The curse is broken not by defeating the Beast but by loving it as it is. Not by demanding that it change first. Not by requiring that it prove itself safe before being accepted. But by the radical act of seeing it clearly and choosing to stay.

This is the Strength card's teaching for relationships. The lion does not become a housecat. It does not stop being a lion. The woman does not transform it into something tame and manageable. She transforms the relationship between them: from adversarial to intimate, from fearful to trusting, from a battle for dominance to a meeting between equals. In love, this translates to the moment when you stop trying to fix your partner's flaws and start trying to understand the wound beneath them. When you stop performing a curated version of yourself and let the other person see the beast you have been hiding. When the mask comes off, not because someone ripped it away, but because the hand on the jaw was gentle enough that it felt safe to let go.

Erotic Surrender: Vulnerability as True Strength

There is a dimension of the Strength card that conventional Tarot interpretation tends to avoid: its relationship to erotic surrender.

The image on the card is intimate. A woman's bare hands on the mouth of a powerful animal. No weapons. No distance. No defensive posture. The proximity alone suggests something that goes beyond intellectual understanding. She is touching the lion. And the lion, despite its power, is allowing itself to be touched. Both parties are surrendering something: the woman surrenders her safety; the lion surrenders its dominance. What emerges between them is neither conquest nor submission, but a third thing, a mutuality that could not exist if either one held back.

Contemporary psychology has begun to articulate what this image has always shown. Vulnerability, far from being a weakness, is the essential ingredient of genuine intimacy. Passion itself depends on it. Desire without vulnerability becomes performance. Physical closeness without emotional exposure becomes mechanical. The willingness to be seen in the act of wanting, to risk rejection, to let someone witness your need, is the foundation on which every meaningful intimate encounter is built.

The paradox at the heart of erotic surrender is the same paradox at the heart of this card: it takes more strength to open than to close. Clenching the jaw is easy. It is a reflex. Every animal does it when threatened. But opening the jaw, letting the breath come, letting the sound emerge, letting the body respond without censoring itself, that requires a kind of courage that has nothing to do with muscular force and everything to do with trust.

If a relationship involves coercion, fear, or harm, the invitation is not to "surrender" but to seek real-world support from trusted people and qualified professionals. The Strength card's surrender is always a choice, never an imposition. It exists only where safety has been established first.

Crowley's Lust: The Radical Teaching

Crowley's renaming of the Strength card to Lust was not a provocation for its own sake. It was, in his system, a correction. He believed that the word "Strength" implied something static: a fortress, a wall, a capacity to endure. What the card actually depicted, he argued, was something dynamic: the joy of strength exercised, energy in motion, the ecstatic engagement with the full spectrum of experience.

These traditions are not the same, and they should not be collapsed into one another. Waite's Strength and Crowley's Lust emerge from different spiritual systems with different assumptions about the body, desire, and the sacred. But the tension between them illuminates something that neither captures alone.

In the Thoth deck, the gentle woman has become Babalon, a figure from Crowley's Thelemic mythology: the Scarlet Woman, the sacred harlot, the divine feminine who has "submitted herself to everything." She does not stand beside the Beast. She rides it. She holds the Holy Grail aloft, overflowing with the mingled blood of the saints, the essence of every experience she has embraced without flinching. The Beast beneath her has seven heads: an Angel, a Saint, a Poet, an Adulterous Woman, a Man of Valour, a Satyr, and a Lion-Serpent. These seven heads represent the totality of human experience, from the most spiritual to the most carnal, all carried by a single creature, all part of the same body.

Crowley's teaching, stripped of its deliberate provocations, is this: you cannot be strong about desire by holding yourself apart from it. You cannot understand the lion by studying it from behind glass. Strength, in the fullest sense, requires engagement. The woman on the Rider-Waite-Smith card demonstrates this with her bare hands on the jaw. Babalon demonstrates it by riding the Beast through the desert, drunk on the cup of experience. Both are showing the same thing from different angles: strength is not the opposite of desire. It is what happens when you meet desire fully.

Strength and Control: What the Card Does Not Mean

The most common misreading of the Strength card in love contexts is that it means "control your emotions." Keep a lid on it. Be the bigger person. Do not let them see you sweat. Maintain composure.

This reading mistakes the card entirely. The woman on the card is not composed in the sense of being shut down. She is composed in the sense of being fully present. There is a vast difference. One involves suppression. The other involves integration. One creates distance from feeling. The other creates intimacy with it.

The difference matters enormously in relationships. A person who controls their emotions is performing stability. They may appear calm, reliable, unshakable. But the lion is still there, pacing behind the wall they have built, growing more agitated the longer it is confined. Eventually it breaks out: as an explosion of rage in an otherwise "calm" person, as a sudden affair from an otherwise "devoted" partner, as the inexplicable departure of someone who seemed to have everything under control. Suppressed instinct does not stay suppressed. It returns, and it returns with interest.

The Strength card offers a different model. The lion is not behind a wall. It is right there, in the open, its mouth being gently held by bare hands. The woman has not eliminated her instinctual nature. She has met it. She is in active, ongoing relationship with it. The garland of flowers between them is not a cage. It is a living, fragile connection that requires constant tending.

In love readings, this distinction is the difference between a partner who "never gets angry" (and eventually implodes) and a partner who can say, clearly and without hostility, "I am angry, and here is why." It is the difference between desire suppressed until it becomes compulsive and desire acknowledged until it becomes a conversation. The Strength card does not advise you to be in control. It advises you to be in contact.

Upright and Reversed in Love Readings

To compare the Strength with the other twenty-one Major Arcana in love readings, upright and reversed, open the free Tarot love chart.

Card Pairings in Intimacy Readings

Strength takes on specific dimensions when she appears alongside other cards in love and relationship spreads.

For the mystic's path through desire and devotion, Cynthia Ray's Tarot and the Path of the Mystic explores the contemplative dimensions of the cards, including the Strength card's teaching on meeting the sacred through the body.

Go deeper · explore our Tarot courses, or download the free 7 chakra chart to map the body's energy centres.