Strength card taming the shadow

The Strength card — a woman opening or closing a lion's jaws with bare hands, a lemniscate floating above her head — is one of the most psychologically precise images in the Major Arcana. It does not depict conquest. It depicts a relationship, and the distinction is everything.

The lion is not the enemy. Jung is direct on this point: "assimilating the shadow gives a man body… the animal sphere of instinct, as well as the primitive or archaic psyche, emerges into the zone of consciousness" (CW 16, para. 452). What the card images is precisely this emergence — not the suppression of instinct but its integration through intimate contact. The woman's hands are on the lion's muzzle, not around its throat.

Nichols reads the ambiguity of those hands as intentional:

"Some say she is closing the lion's mouth. Others see her as opening it. Perhaps the picture is left intentionally ambiguous, for doubtless the woman must perform each action at various times, depending on circumstances."

There are times when the instinctual lion needs to roar, and times when even kings need restraint. The card holds both possibilities simultaneously, which is precisely what shadow work requires: not a fixed policy toward the unconscious, but a living, responsive dialogue.

The contrast with the masculine approach is instructive. Place notes that earlier decks — including the Visconti-Sforza — depicted Hercules clubbing the Nemean lion, the patriarchal solution of killing what threatens (Place, 2005). Banzhaf develops this further: Samson and Heracles, the lion-slayers of myth, both came to grief through their suppressed feminine sides — Samson through Delilah, Heracles through the poisoned robe of Deianeira, his wound ultimately costing him his life. "Mere suppression of the shadow," Jung remarked, "is as little of a remedy as beheading would be for a headache" (quoted in Banzhaf, 2000). The card's woman does not behead. She touches.

What makes this touching possible is the quality Nichols identifies as the anima's specific gift: the capacity for mediation between ego-consciousness and the primitive psyche. The woman in Strength approaches the lion from his hidden, unconscious side — her foot and flowing robes suggesting motion and give-and-take — while Samson braces his feet and cannot yield an inch. The feminine mode of relating does not oppose the beast directly; it meets it where it lives.

The shadow dimension of the lion is worth pressing. Jung's alchemical reading of the lion as the king in his theriomorphic form — the ruler "overpowered or overlaid by his animal side" who "consequently expresses himself only in animal reactions, which are nothing but emotions" — locates the card squarely in the territory of uncontrollable affect (Jung, 1955, Mysterium Coniunctionis, para. 405). The green lion of alchemy consumes its own spirit; the red lion is sulphur, fiery dynamism, the dangerous potency of Sol. To drink the lion's blood, in alchemical terms, is to assimilate the primitive, affective manifestations of the Self and submit them to transformation. The woman in Strength is doing exactly this — not at a distance, but with her bare hands.

Woodman's formulation from somatic work captures the same dynamic in a different register: "The aim in analysis is to bring the magnificent energy of the wild horse under the control of the rider, without using a whip that will kill its spirit" (Woodman, 1982). The shadow dare not simply be embraced as a long-lost sister, she insists — the ego must maintain a healthy suspicion, must chew the primitive material rather than swallow it whole. Integration requires digestion. The Strength card images the beginning of that digestion: the hands on the muzzle, the lemniscate of infinite exchange above the head, the golden energy of the lion flowing up the woman's arms to rest like a crown at her brow.

Hillman adds a caution against reducing the lion to a single meaning. The lion in a dream is always inside an image, displaying itself in a scene and bringing a mood:

"To consider the lion in a dream as only the power drive of ego-centric self-importance, or as the drive toward awakening solar consciousness, neglects the eros quality of the lion, that its light brings warmth."

The lion's locus in astrological physiology is the heart; its home, the house of pleasure and love. The shadow, when met with the quality of attention the Strength card images, does not only yield its aggression — it yields its warmth. What the ego has refused is not only dangerous; it is also alive, and the life it carries is precisely what the persona's polish has cost.

The card's position at the opening of the second decade of the Major Arcana is not incidental. Banzhaf reads it as the threshold of the feminine path through the double-digit cards — the encounter with the shadow that must precede the deeper descents of the Hermit, the Hanged Man, and Death. The ego must be strong enough to withstand the confrontation before it can afford to make it. But once that strength is present, the task is not conquest. It is the intimate, ambiguous, ongoing dialogue that the woman and the lion are already having — hands on the muzzle, eyes open, neither one devouring the other.

  • Shadow — the archetype of everything the ego has refused, and the first threshold of individuation
  • James Hillman — archetypal psychology's reading of animal figures in dreams and imagination
  • Marion Woodman — somatic and feminine approaches to shadow integration
  • Edward Edinger — alchemical amplification of the lion as theriomorphic king

Sources Cited

  • Nichols, Sallie, 1980, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey
  • Hillman, James, 2008, Animal Presences
  • Banzhaf, Hajo, 2000, Tarot and the Journey of the Hero
  • Place, Robert M., 2005, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination
  • Woodman, Marion, 1982, Addiction to Perfection
  • Jung, Carl Gustav, 1955, Mysterium Coniunctionis
  • Samuels, Andrew, 1985, Jung and the Post-Jungians