Divinatory meaning
- Upright
- Power, energy, action, courage, magnanimity; also complete success and honours.
- Reversed
- Despotism, abuse if power, weakness, discord, sometimes even disgrace.
major arcana
8
Strength
Suit: Trumps Major Arcana
Also known as Fortitude.
Core interpretation
Strength meets the lion without violence. Courage here is patient, intimate mastery: instinct and passion are guided into accord, not crushed into silence.
A card carries more than one history. Its place in the tarot pack, Golden Dawn path, Rider–Waite–Smith reading and later variants are kept beside their own sources, since the same name can do different work in different decks.
8 sourced claims: 4 traditional , 3 modern , 1 contested
In the Rider–Waite–Smith deck
The meanings are Waite's own words from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. They belong to one influential school of reading and do not exhaust what the cards have meant in other hands.
What this deck does differently
Waite prints this trump as “Fortitude”. Waite numbers Strength VIII and Justice XI, reversing the order common in older packs.
A. E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith, Rider–Waite–Smith — Part III, §3, The Greater Arcana and their Divinatory Meanings.
The same card in the Thoth deck
Lust · XI · The Daughter of the Flaming Sword
What the card shows
ModernA woman gently closes a lion's jaws beneath an infinity sign; a floral chain makes control an image of beneficent fortitude and inward union.
A concise paraphrase of Waite's published explanation of the Pamela Colman Smith design, not a universal description of all historical decks.
Divinatory meaning
ModernUpright, Waite associates Strength with energy, courage, generous action, success and honour. Reversed, the card warns of weakness, discord, despotism or power used without inner balance.
Waite himself warns that many fortune-telling allocations are artificial and arbitrary; these are historical Rider–Waite–Smith meanings, not assertions of fact.
Tree of Life association
Hermetic Qabalah
Path 19 · ט Teth · Chesed to Geburah
- Letter
- Teth — Serpent
- Zodiac
- Leo
Book T establishes this Tarot-to-letter attribution. The path number and endpoints belong to this tradition's canonical Kircher arrangement.
Sources (2)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — The Twenty-Two Keys of the Book, pp. 5–7
Golden Dawn correspondences 4 sourced claims
Book T's formal title, Tree or elemental place, astrological attribution, and characteristic reading. This is the system used by the Hermetic Tree.
The Daughter of the Flaming Sword
The formal esoteric title printed in Book T.
Sources (1)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — The Titles of the Symbols, pp. 5–7
ט · Teth
A Golden Dawn correspondence, not a claim about the historical origin of the card or a universal Jewish letter-to-card system.
Sources (2)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — The Twenty-Two Keys of the Book, pp. 5–7
Leo
Book T's attribution carried by the Hebrew letter and therefore by this path.
Sources (2)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — The Twenty-Two Keys of the Book, pp. 5–7
Eternal justice, strength held at the point of judgment, law, or trial.
Paraphrased from Book T's brief meanings; its dignity method reads a card in relation to neighbouring cards rather than as a fixed keyword.
Sources (1)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — Brief Meanings of Twenty-Two Keys, pp. 46–47
History and variants 2 sourced claims
Historical context and places where influential decks or occult systems differ.
One of the twenty-one figured trumps plus the Fool found beside the four ordinary suits in historical tarot packs.
Museum history dates the earliest documentary references to the 1440s–1450s in northern Italy and identifies tarot's original use as a trick-taking game. The occult-Qabalistic reading is later.
Sources (1)
- Before Fortune-Telling: The History and Structure of Tarot Cards , Metropolitan Museum of Art online article, 2016 — paragraphs 1–4
Waite numbers Strength VIII and Justice XI, reversing the order common in older packs.
The Tree follows Golden Dawn and Rider–Waite–Smith numbering. Older deck traditions retain Justice VIII and Strength XI.
Sources (2)
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot , Illustrated edition, William Rider & Son, 1922 — Part II, §2, Strength or Fortitude
- Before Fortune-Telling: The History and Structure of Tarot Cards , Metropolitan Museum of Art online article, 2016 — Visconti-Sforza trump sequence · contradicts
Correspondences 3 sourced correspondences
| Relation | To | First attested |
|---|---|---|
| Tarot trump of | Path 19 · Teth | 1888 CE |
| Hebrew-letter attribution | Teth | 1888 CE |
| Astrological attribution | Leo | 1888 CE |