Strength.
The jaw closed with fingertips.
Upright, then reversed, as Waite gave them in 1910.
A woman in a white dress stands with both hands on a lion's head, closing its jaws. A lying-down eight floats above her hair. A chain of roses goes round her waist and over the animal's neck. Its tail is tucked between its back legs.
Almost no force is being used. Both hands are on the animal and neither is straining; the chain is flowers; the tail is tucked. Whatever you are currently managing, you are using less pressure than you think, and it is working, and the animal is not enjoying it.
Four things people go to on this card
- her hands
You went to her hands. Both are on the lion's head and jaw, and neither is pressing.
The amount of force this turns out to need, which is almost none. She is closing an animal's mouth with her fingertips, and the only strain in the picture is in the animal.
The lion is the strength in this card. She is the thing that is stronger, and the drawing makes that point by refusing to show any effort at all. Somewhere you have been applying weight to something that would give way to a hand. Try the hand first. You can always go back to the weight.
Where have you been applying force to something that would yield to a hand?
- the roses
The chain is what you chose. Roses, round her waist and over the lion's neck, joining the two of them.
A bond either party could break at any moment, and neither does. Roses are not restraint; a lion could walk through that chain without noticing it had happened. That is the whole claim of the card and it is made with flowers.
If you are holding something difficult together at the moment, the card wants to know what is doing the holding. Force and agreement look identical from outside and behave completely differently the first time either party is tested. You will find out which yours is on a bad day, not a good one.
Is what is holding this together force or agreement?
- the tail
Your eye went to the tail, down and tucked between the back legs.
Not a partnership of equals, whatever the roses suggest. The animal is submitting and it does not look happy about it, and the tail is the only part of the picture that says so.
Catch that before the card gets read as pure gentleness. Something is being subdued here: gently, without violence, and still subdued. There is a part of you being kept quiet in exactly this way, and it has been quiet long enough that you have stopped asking how it feels about the arrangement.
What in you is being kept quiet at the moment, and how does it feel about it?
- the lemniscate
You picked the figure eight above her head. The Magician has the same one.
Two cards are linked on purpose here: the same endless loop, once over a man with four tools on a table and once over a woman with nothing in her hands at all.
Which makes this a competence and not a virtue. She is not being nice to the lion. She is doing a technical thing extremely well and has done it often enough that it costs her nothing visible. You have something like that now. It used to take everything you had, and you have forgotten that it did.
What do you now do effortlessly that used to take everything you had?
On the Tree of Life, Strength is the nineteenth path, Teth, from Chesed to Geburah, in the Golden Dawn's attribution (Liber 777).
Draw a card, and if this one turns, press whichever of these four you went to and the reading is written from there instead. Pulled it in a spread of your own? Read the whole spread here.