What does the Strength card mean?

It points to influence through patience. The image shows a woman closing a lion's jaws with no strain at all. She has built a relationship with something dangerous, so force is not needed. Upright it favors persuasion and steadiness. Reversed it points to self-doubt, or a feeling being held down instead of understood.

What is the difference between Strength and The Chariot?

They solve the same problem in two ways. The Chariot holds opposing forces together by willpower, and has to keep doing it. Strength wins the force over so it stops pulling. One is control and the other is relationship. Only the second stays solved without constant effort.

What does Strength reversed mean?

Most often self-doubt: you have the ability but are not using it, and the gap between what you can do and what you believe has become the obstacle. It also covers a temper or craving being held down instead of examined, and gentleness used to keep putting off a confrontation.

Is Strength a good card in love?

It is one of the gentler love cards. It favors warm patience, steadiness through a rough patch, and influence through consistency instead of ultimatums. For something new, it suggests a connection worth taking slowly. Reversed, notice where insecurity or jealousy may be warping things.

Strength tarot card meaning (upright & reversed)

Look at her hands. She is closing the lion’s mouth without forcing anything, and her arms are relaxed. There is no strain anywhere in the picture. That is a strange way to show a card called Strength, unless the point is that we usually get the word wrong. Waite says the lion is led by a chain of flowers.

The danger here has not been defeated. Defeating it would mean doing it again next week. It has been won over, which is slower and less dramatic, and it does not need repeating.

Strength upright meaning

The gentle approach beating the forceful one.

Strength is often misread as gritting your teeth and pushing through. Waite's meanings were power, energy, action, courage, and generosity of spirit, with complete success and honors. The picture shows almost the opposite. A woman has her hands on a lion's jaws, and she is completely relaxed. She is not overpowering it. She has built a relationship with something dangerous, so force is no longer needed. That takes longer, but it does not need repeating. In practice the card favors patience with a difficult person, a difficult feeling, or a difficult side of yourself. It shows up when you want to force a resolution and the better path is slower: keep showing up, stay steady, and let things come to you. It is about influence. Its harder lesson is internal. The lion is often your own anger, craving, or fear. Locking it away takes force, and force has to be applied again and again. Understanding it is what calms it down.

Strength reversed meaning

Self-doubt, or a feeling held down instead of understood.

Waite's reversed meanings were tyranny, abuse of power, weakness, and discord. Modern readers more often look inward. Reversed, Strength usually points inward. The most common reading is a confidence problem. You have the ability, but you are not using it. The gap between what you can do and what you believe you can do may now be the real obstacle. The card rarely asks you to gain something new. It asks you to notice what you have already survived. The second reading is using force where patience was needed. A temper held down instead of examined, a craving suppressed instead of understood, or a difficult person managed by pressure. These work for a while, but each time costs more, because anything held down needs more and more effort to keep down. A third, less obvious version is gentleness used to avoid something. Patience is the card's strength, but it becomes a hiding place when you keep putting off a confrontation and call the delay kindness.

A reversal is rarely the upright card's opposite. Reversed tarot cards covers the four conditions a reversal usually describes, and how to tell which one a spread is asking for. Every card's reversed meaning sits beside its upright one on reversed tarot card meanings.

Strength in Waite's 1910 key

The meanings above are Reflecta's reading. These are the ones A. E. Waite gave in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), the guide he wrote for the deck Pamela Colman Smith drew. He wrote them for fortune-telling, a use tarot took on centuries after it began as a card game in fifteenth-century Italy. Some of his words are blunt, and none of them can tell you what will happen.

Upright: Power, energy, action, courage, magnanimity; also complete success and honors.
Reversed: Despotism, abuse of power, weakness, discord, sometimes even disgrace.

Symbolism in the card

Her hands on the lion's jaws: Waite describes a woman closing the jaws of a lion. She is gently closing its mouth. She is not prying or straining. The whole meaning of the card is in how relaxed she is next to something that could kill her.
The lion's lowered head: Waite says her kind courage has already subdued the lion, which is led by a chain of flowers. The lion has been won over. Something persuaded stays calm. Something beaten has to be beaten again tomorrow.
The lemniscate above her, as on The Magician: Waite calls it the symbol of life. In Smith's drawing the same sign floats over The Magician, and here it hangs over a woman with no tools at all. The Magician works through instruments. She works through calm, and the card treats calm as the power that lasts longer.

Strength in love and relationships

Upright. Patience with someone, the warm kind and not the resigned kind. The card favors staying steady through a hard patch and influencing things through consistency instead of ultimatums. For a new relationship it suggests something worth taking slowly.

Reversed. Insecurity warping the relationship, jealousy handled badly, or one person endlessly managing the other's moods. It can also mean avoiding a needed conversation and calling it patience.

Strength in career and work

Upright. Influence without authority: the colleague who changes things by being reasonable, again and again. Strong for negotiation, difficult clients, and conflict at work. The card favors calm persistence over raising the stakes.

Reversed. Feeling like an impostor, or backing down in rooms where you had something to say. It can also point to a conflict being buried instead of solved, which often comes back bigger.

Strength in money

Upright. Discipline that does not rely on going without. Steady habits, kept calmly, work better than dramatic cutbacks. The card favors a plan you can keep up.

Reversed. Impulse spending to cope with a feeling, or money worries so big they block sensible decisions. The fear may be doing more damage than the numbers.

Strength as feelings

Upright. As feelings, Strength describes warmth that is patient and secure. The feeling is strong but unhurried, and from outside it can look cool. The card cannot confirm what anyone else feels. It describes a steadiness you can look for in how they show up.

Reversed. Reversed, it can describe feelings tangled up with insecurity, care that is afraid of itself, or jealousy nobody has named. The card cannot see into another person. It can ask how the uncertainty is affecting you, and what you need.

Is Strength a yes or a no?

Upright, it leans yes. Reversed, it leans maybe.

Upright it leans yes. The focus is on how, more than whether. The card favors patience over pushing, which often means slower than you would like. Reversed it sits at maybe. You may have what it takes, but something is in the way, often low confidence or a feeling you have not dealt with. Read the leaning as a question about approach. The outcome is not fixed.

Every card's leaning in one table, upright and reversed, is on yes or no tarot, along with what a maybe is asking you to do.

Strength as a birth card

2,972 of the 36,890 dates between 1925 and 2025, 8.1% of them, give Strength as a birth card on its own, with nothing under it: a number below 10 is where the reduction stops. It also turns up as the second card beneath The Star, because 17 reduces to 8.

Which card is yours comes from your birthday rather than from the deck. The tarot birth card calculator runs the reduction on a date of birth and shows every step of it. The date stays in the browser.

Strength card combinations

+ Strength and The Chariot: Two ways of handling a difficult force. The Chariot controls it. Strength wins it over. Together they usually mean force has gone as far as it can, and the rest of the way needs a different approach.
+ Strength and The Devil: Facing a compulsion head on. Strength is one of the few cards that answers The Devil. It works by understanding the craving instead of fighting it, and that is the approach that works best.
+ Strength and The Sun: Quiet skill leading to visible success. Together they suggest the patient approach is working, and other people may soon see the result too.
+ Strength and The Moon: Staying steady through uncertainty. A useful pairing: clarity may not come first, and you can hold your nerve without it. That is often the real skill being asked for.

Every pairing on this site, Strength's included, is collected on tarot card combinations.

I do not have to overpower this to handle it.

Strength: common questions

What does the Strength card mean?: It points to influence through patience. The image shows a woman closing a lion's jaws with no strain at all. She has built a relationship with something dangerous, so force is not needed. Upright it favors persuasion and steadiness. Reversed it points to self-doubt, or a feeling being held down instead of understood.
What is the difference between Strength and The Chariot?: They solve the same problem in two ways. The Chariot holds opposing forces together by willpower, and has to keep doing it. Strength wins the force over so it stops pulling. One is control and the other is relationship. Only the second stays solved without constant effort.
What does Strength reversed mean?: Most often self-doubt: you have the ability but are not using it, and the gap between what you can do and what you believe has become the obstacle. It also covers a temper or craving being held down instead of examined, and gentleness used to keep putting off a confrontation.
Is Strength a good card in love?: It is one of the gentler love cards. It favors warm patience, steadiness through a rough patch, and influence through consistency instead of ultimatums. For something new, it suggests a connection worth taking slowly. Reversed, notice where insecurity or jealousy may be warping things.