Upright keywords
- courage
- gentle power
- patience
- self-compassion
- inner strength
Reversed keywords
Upright meaning
Waite calls this card Fortitude: power, courage, energy, magnanimity, and its picture is telling, a figure closing a lion's mouth with bare hands and a calm face. Upright, Strength is about the quiet kind of power, the kind that does not need to roar. You may be facing something that flares, an emotion, a craving, a difficult person, a fear, and the card's counsel is neither to suppress it nor to let it dictate terms. Meet it steadily, keep your voice low, hold your ground. Patience here is not passivity; it is strength exercised slowly. This is also a card of self-compassion: taming the inner critic that growls at every misstep, and learning to treat your own appetite and anger as parts of you to be handled, not enemies to be destroyed. Notice where you have been gentle with others and harsh with yourself. Courage, the old kind, is feeling the fear and the tremble and acting from your values anyway. You are stronger than the moment asks you to believe.
Reversed meaning
Reversed, Strength flags an imbalance between force and gentleness, usually in how you treat yourself. The typical shapes: willpower exhausted by white-knuckling a problem that needs compassion instead, confidence leaking out through harsh self-talk, or impulses, temper, appetite, spending, scrolling, running the show while the calmer part of you watches from the back seat. There is often burnout underneath: strength drawn from reserves that have not been refilled. This card asks where your energy is actually going and who or what is draining it. If you have been controlling a person or situation through pressure, notice the cost to the relationship and to your own peace; forcing compliance is a weak position even when it works. Begin with the smallest repair: sleep, food, a walk, one honest conversation with yourself. Real power in this position returns not through harder grips but through softer ones, steadier rhythms, and the humility to ask for help before the breaking point.
Classical excerpt — The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911), Part I
The first alternative is better symbolically, but either is an instance of strength in its conventional understanding, and conveys the idea of mastery. It has been said that the figure represents organic force, moral force and the principle of all force.