major arcana
Suit: Trumps Major Arcana
Also known as Fortitude.
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
This deck publishes no meanings, and none are supplied for it here. Marseille packs were printed for play, and the divinatory readings attached to them by Etteilla and his successors came later and from outside — presenting those as this deck's own would date them a century too early.
This deck calls the card La Force; it is filed here as Strength and numbers it XI.
This deck's book publishes no upright and reversed lists, so none are shown. Its account of the card is cited below rather than reproduced.
Printed “LA FORCE” across the foot of the card. This deck numbers it XI, the order older than the Rider–Waite pack's, which moved Strength to VIII so that it would fall under Leo. The Thoth deck restores the same order this one keeps. The numerals are additive — IIII, VIIII, XVIIII — not the subtractive IV, IX and XIX of modern usage.
Lequart, Paris, Marseille — BnF, Estampes et photographie, BOITE FOL-KH-383.
Strength
A 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.
Upright, 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.
Hermetic Qabalah
Book T establishes this Tarot-to-letter attribution. The path number and endpoints belong to this tradition's canonical Kircher arrangement.
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.
ט · Teth
A Golden Dawn correspondence, not a claim about the historical origin of the card or a universal Jewish letter-to-card system.
Leo
Book T's attribution carried by the Hebrew letter and therefore by this path.
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.
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.
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.
| Relation | To | First attested |
|---|---|---|
| Tarot trump of | Path 19 · Teth | 1888 CE |
| Hebrew-letter attribution | Teth | 1888 CE |
| Astrological attribution | Leo | 1888 CE |