Strength
Strength is card 8 of the Major Arcana in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. Readers traditionally take it as courage, patience and the gentle kind of control that calms a situation rather than overpowering it.
- Major Arcana
- Card 8
- Golden Dawn
- Leo
- Upright
- courage, patience, gentle control
- Reversed
- self-doubt, raw emotion, low energy
Upright
A woman closing a lion's jaws with her bare hands is not winning a fight; she is taming one. Readers take the card as inner strength: courage, compassion and steady patience with difficult feelings, whether your own or another person's. Force is not the point. Composure is.
Reversed
Self-doubt is the common reading of the reversed card. The courage is there but hard to reach, or strong feelings are running the show. Some readers take it as low energy, a sign to rest before trying again.
In love and at work
For relationships, readers see patience, warmth and the tact to handle hard moments without making them worse. For work, it is linked with persistence, calm leadership and roles that need a steady hand.
In the picture
A woman in white, crowned with flowers and belted with a chain of roses, bends over a red lion and holds its jaws. The same figure-eight of infinity that the Magician wears floats over her head. Waite placed the card eighth, swapping it with Justice to match the Golden Dawn, which gave it to Leo.
In a Caelumia profile
When Strength comes up upright in a Caelumia reading, it counts toward these themes for that day, alongside the rest of the profile: Determination, Emotional depth, Nurture.
Sources
- A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910). Waite's own guide to the deck he designed with Pamela Colman Smith, with each card's divinatory meanings.
- Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Book T: The Tarot (1890s, published by Israel Regardie in The Golden Dawn (1937 to 1940)). The source of the planetary, zodiac and elemental attributions of the cards.
Updated September 28, 2026.
See it in your own profile
Caelumia reads your whole birth chart and your numbers together, and shows where they agree. Your profile is free to start, and your first results appear while you answer.