STRENGTH: The Lion Heart of Rage.
A Tarot offering for Leo season
You ever feel like smashing something? Throwing your phone across the room? Screaming? It’s not just me, right?
I’ve been thinking a lot about RAGE lately. Its undeniable HEAT. How it sweeps through my body like a wave. Or creeps in slow, simmering away my sense of ease. I like to think I have a high boiling point, but everyone has their limit. This year I’m meeting mine more than usual—and I don’t think it’s entirely to do with perimenopause.
Something dormant is being poked, poked, poked.
And when it wakes—it ROARS.
Psychologists sometimes categorize anger as a secondary emotion—one that masks or distracts from deeper feelings of grief, inadequacy, fear, and/or helplessness. It’s described as a hold-over from our early evolutionary lives when we roamed the wild in loin cloths carrying clubs—a rush of anger is useful for battering an attacking lion. But, today, we mostly experience anger as an interpersonal nuisance. We snap at a spouse. Roll our eyes at a coworker. Avoid saying anything at all lest someone get hurt. And yet…
Emotions are messengers.
Emotions carry important information about the needs of our instinctual, animal bodies and reveal our core values. Even difficult emotions, the ones that we have been taught to fear in ourselves and others: Rage. Disappointment. Loneliness. Desire. They are sources of power, ready to be harnessed—if we are to live into our full potential as individuals and members of a beloved community. This is the message of the STRENGTH card.
Its traditional imagery depicts a powerful animal (usually a lion) under the care and influence of a human figure (often a woman). In the Rider Waite Smith Tarot, the figure is adorned with flowers, roses and greenery; a lemniscate, or infinity symbol hovers above her crown. She often has her hands placed in or around the mouth of the beast, like a caregiver about to remove a shard of bone wedged painfully between the creature’s teeth. Her gaze is gentle, relaxed. She isn’t nervous, as I would be, that the lion will turn feral and claim her supple fingers as a snack.
These attributes mark the figure as somewhat otherworldly or at least as a version of our Selves impervious to the threat of pain; if she’s not immune to the gusts of ALL 8 Worldly Winds, those attachments or aversions that buddhists say keep us trapped in Samsara.1 We might refer to the caretaker in STRENGTH as our Higher Self. Jung would have called her the anima.
She differs from our conscience (or Freud’s super-ego) which regulates our behavior based on learned societal norms. Instead, she is our personal embodiment of Divine Grace—our own internal Sophia.2 Under her patient, compassionate caress, the lion of our base emotions yields its power without complaint.
It’s impressive. Old-timey circus performers would have made a killing if they’d had half of this Sophia’s skill.
After all, Jung called the lion “a ‘fiery’ animal, an emblem of the devil, [that] stands for the danger of being swallowed by the unconscious.”3 Like so many animals appearing in myth, legend and fairy tales, the lion represents a primal force, a bevy of instincts, that must be integrated for the hero to reach maturation—to level-up, as it were.
Who are you in this picture? The Caregiver or the Creature?
When I lead our monthly Tarot Circle for Wildflower Church, I often ask participants to reflect on any associations that they have with a card’s imagery before they refer to their guidebooks. Taking note of significant colors, shapes, numbers, and the stories that the cards bring to mind, helps to unlock each person’s intuitive relationship to the cards. When we gather our impressions together, the group develops a unique window into the Collective Unconscious around these archetypes. Our impressions are critical to developing our own lexicon of symbols—which cannot be accessed in any guidebook.
For me, the STRENGTH card evokes the classic fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, which I encountered, like most people of my generation, through Disney’s animated feature. This was never my favorite Disney adventure. I did love Belle—my favorite scene was the opener, when she voraciously gobbles up fantasy novels amid a social setting that doesn’t quite “get her” (Relatable!!) But even as a child I never could quite buy that Belle would fall in love with THE BEAST—an actual horned animal, that basically kept her as a captive in his lonely old castle. I don’t care how many books he has in his library or how fetching are the castle wardrobe’s gowns.
When my undergraduate professors in Women’s Studies taught me to read Beauty and the Beast as a parable of female subjugation—an insidious story that encourages young women to overlook their partners’ beastly tendencies in the name of love, I felt my aversion to the tale was finally justified.
However, there’s a sense of loss, for me, reading fairy tales primarily as tools of patriarchal indoctrination. It’s not that those themes aren’t there—but are they the whole story? It feels reductive—boiling them down to mere means of subjugation. That’s why I loved Lisa Marchiano’s book The Vital Spark: Reclaim Your Outlaw Energies and Find Your Feminine Fire. Like Belle with her library book, I gobbled up Marchiano’s Jungian analyses of myth and legend—enthralled by her use of fairytales as touchstones for reclaiming personal power. In a Jungian sense, every character in the tale represents an aspect of the Self, replete with legitimate longings and dreams, strengths and shortcomings.
We are, in fact, both the Lady and the Lion.
The Beast in the classic tale represents our unchecked temper: anger unleashed in service of selfish interests without regard to people or surroundings. The story’s insistence that only love can break the spell and transform the Beast into a human again—provides a clue as to how to integrate these impulsive reactions in ourselves.
Like Belle, we must learn to meet our animal selves with compassion, curiosity, and care.
Most of us don’t do this reflexively. Because we live in a carceral society, we police each other externally and thereby police ourselves internally. When we have a ‘bad’ feeling, we subject the feeling to a degree of punishment. Cage it. Keep it captive. Underwraps. We send our so-called negative feelings into our SHADOW (the spooky West Wing of our psyche) and we tell the other parts of ourselves: Just don’t go there. It’s forbidden.
There’s more than a bit of wisdom in this pattern.
None of us wants to live in a world where all of our wildest impulses are allowed to run rampant. I bet you can think of a few people you know who would do better to reign in their stickier traits. (Agreed.)
But I heard something recently from a spiritual channeler I follow that affirmed a sense I have around the intrinsic value of troubling emotions. He said that a flash of anger, from the root chakra upward, can actually serve to open the heart.
There’s something in that claim that feels very mysterious to me, at least when I consider my own relationship to anger. I react to anger in myself and others with hardness. Shields. A pattern of disengagement. But the anger itself…the heat of it in my body…I think I can almost imagine how it might give way to a sort of softening, an internal release. Almost. I’m a long way from putting this into action.
The first step, it seems, is to be the gentle goddess to ourselves—to meet our emotion without judgement. “Allow the emotion to be felt,” as therapists obliquely advise. But most of us don’t have a concept for what it means to feel our emotions. Maybe we’ve been injured by others’ destructive emotional reactions so often that it’s frightening to imagine coexisting with our wild natures. Our collective history is so full of harm—it is a special kind of challenge, asking any of us to embody the STRENGTH we would need in order to allow these impulses a place at our figurative table.
But if we can bring it back to Belle—I wonder if accepting her own animal impulse is what allows her to open up to real, embodied intimacy. That opening scene that I loved so much, of a girl content with her novels and stories, only allows connection in the abstract. Belle cannot be in “real” relationship until her anger (externalized in the form of the beast) is integrated as a part of her Self. It’s no mistake then, that this anger is what liberates Belle from the threat of internalized, toxic masculinity represented in her suitor, Gaston. (The best, worst Disney Villain, IMO). Maybe Disney in this instance got it right.
In the movie, Gaston and the Beast duke it out on the castle’s edge, but for us integrating our anger might look like learning to identify (and ultimately stand up for) our unmet needs in relationships. (I am so bad at this.) This takes a lot of damn self-awareness and also—TIME—which many of us are used to experiencing in short supply. But this work, the work of the STRENGTH card, is worth it. It’s the only way to break the spell.
Set Yourself Free.
When we pull the STRENGTH card, we’re meant to ask ourselves, what would happen if I allowed myself to feel ANY and ALL emotions without judgement? Without fear? What if I could cultivate the confidence to work with my difficult emotions, knowing that no matter what feeling arises, I will never abandon myself?
Therapists, again, suggest that when we are cultivating this relationship to ourselves it helps to “validate” our emotions. But what does that actually mean when our emotions so easily out-pace reality, routinely slipping into the nonsensical?
Oren Jay Sofer, teacher of non-violent communication, argues that our fiery feelings arise when there is a real or perceived threat to our needs and values. This reaction is legitimate. It sucks to meet with the realization that none of us has all of our needs met all of the time. But we CAN live in integrity with the VALUES that our emotions reflect, whether or not they are satisfied. Advocacy then becomes valuable in its own right, independent of outcomes—putting us in a stronger position to maintain our efforts and engage creative problem solving. But first, identifying what needs/values really matter to us relies on our ability to investigate the emotions that signal them.
Emotions like anger—that produce a lot of palpable energy—seem particularly rife with potential. Fire, after all, is the element of transformation, creativity, evolution. It is the source of alchemical magic.
Likewise, the Lion of our heart is meant to roar. It holds the key to our power; our ability to enact change; to encourage healthy, aligned personal and societal growth. As Sallie Nichols writes:
“experiencing the beast’s power does not mean that we must act out our rages and aggressions at the top of our lungs, indulging our hysterics in the name of therapy. On the contrary, whenever we throw our affects at others, we throw away something that belongs to ourselves: the experience of the beast as our beast— and we lose contact with his strength.”
In other words, when the BEAST comes, he comes from and for ourselves. Yes, his energy may fuel our efforts in expressing our values; yet we cannot put his energy to its best use, until we are willing to tend the Beast with compassion and care. Only then can the burn of anger, alchemized through the heart, ready us to create. To make life new. To further our aligned action. We desperately NEED this energy to propel us forward on the looping lemniscate of our spiritual evolution. Let’s not tamp it out, but greet it as a protector. As a friend.
Connect with the Lion Inside
Try this 3-card spread.
CARD 1 — Which of my needs/values does my Lion yearn to satisfy?
CARD 2 — How does my inner Lion try to protect me?
CARD 3 — How can I demonstrate more compassion for the Lion inside?
It takes courage to live with a lion. Let’s give each other some credit for trying. We all know how hard it can be.
Thanks for reading.
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These 8 winds are categorized in four pairs: pleasure/pain, status/disgrace, praise/censure, gain/loss. I love Ethan Nichtern’s modern take on these influences in his book Confidence: Holding Your Seat Through Life’s Eight Worldly Winds (2024). Nichtern’s work also influenced my reading of the Justice card, a close companion to Strength, as both seek a compromise between heavenly vision and material reality: Justice in the external world, Strength in the internal. Not so incidentally, Justice and Strength are sometimes flipped in their order among the major arcana.
Sophia is the feminine counterpart to Christ as worshipped by the Gnostics and Christian mystics. Her presence is often symbolized through the color RED, as in the roses on the Strength Figure’s, dress, and the cloak and curtain of the figure in the Justice card.
See Tarot and the Archetypal Journey: The Jungian Path from Darkness to Light (2019).