Tarot · Major Arcana
Strength
Key VIII - Fire
Correspondences
- Element
- Fire
- Planet
- Sun
- Sign
- Leo
- Number
- 8
- Yes / no
- Yes upright, Maybe reversed
Traditional Golden Dawn attributions. The yes / no value is a convention for single-card questions, not a prediction.
Upright
The gentlest strength, patience paired with compassion, will succeed where force fails.
Strength. The gentlest strength, patience paired with compassion, will succeed where force fails. Eighth: the mastery that works through patience rather than force. The hand laid on the lion's jaw, not the sword drawn against it. Under the Sun, its action is to make plain and to centre: what it touches becomes visible, and becomes the thing everything else arranges itself around. Being Fire, it resolves through action rather than deliberation. Its keyword range runs through inner courage, quiet resolve, patience, compassionate power, and taming instinct.
Reversed
Instinct is running the show, or confidence has quietly drained away.
Strength reversed. Instinct is running the show, or confidence has quietly drained away. Its sign is Leo, which displays: the heart made visible, generous and proud, needing to be genuinely seen rather than merely tolerated. Reversed here, it is loosening rather than failing. The grip of this is coming off, and the reversal reads as release rather than denial. Its keyword range, to be read here as difficulty, delay, or a lesson not yet learned: self-doubt, raw emotion unchecked, insecurity, brute force, and depleted resolve.
About the Tarot
A 15th-century Italian card game that was turned to fortune-telling only 350 years later.
The upright and reversed meanings here follow the mainstream Rider-Waite-Smith reading tradition. A reversed card is treated as the same force blocked, turned inward, or overexpressed - not simply as its opposite.
Full history →Meanings are a guide to a symbolic tradition, offered for reflection and entertainment. They do not predict the future or describe real people or events. See the Terms.