Strength

From the Latin 'fortitudo', one of the four cardinal virtues of classical philosophy (alongside Justice, Temperance, and Prudence). The card is one of three cardinal virtues preserved in the Major Arcana — Prudence was dropped — and its name carries that moral weight.

The Visconti-Sforza deck already shows the virtue as Hercules wrestling a lion or a woman prying open a lion's jaws by force. The Marseille tradition depicts a woman breaking a lion's mouth open with her bare hands, an image of physical muscular strength. The lion is the wild beast to be overcome.

Smith softened the violence. A woman in white, wearing the infinity symbol above her head, gently closes a lion's mouth with a garland of flowers. The lion is red, tongue lolling, entirely unthreatening. Strength is no longer muscular force but the power of love and patience that tames the beast without harming it.

The woman represents compassion and inner fortitude; the infinity sign, the eternal spiritual strength that does not strain. The lion is the raw instinct and desire that is not killed but befriended. The wreath of flowers denotes the harmony of nature, and the white robe, purity of motive. This is moral courage — strength that creates rather than destroys.

In the Marseille order Strength is numbered XI and Justice VIII, placing law before force. Waite swapped them so that Strength becomes VIII and Justice XI, arguing that inner fortitude must precede fair judgment. In the Thoth deck Crowley renames the card 'Lust' and depicts a woman riding the lion, attributing it to Leo and recasting strength as the divinized life force.

The image draws on Hercules and the Nemean lion, Samson rending the lion, and Daniel in the lions' den. Astrologically it corresponds to Leo. As a cardinal virtue it is one of the moral anchors of the trump sequence, and its repositioning by Waite is one of the most consequential structural changes in modern tarot.