Strength

This card evolved early on from the image of a man in an adversarial relationship with a lion, usually seen as Hercules and the Nemean lion, forcibly subduing or even killing the beast, to that of a beauty, finessing or whispering her beast into a familiar relationship. In parallel, the idea of force has evolved from violence into a higher understanding of Fortitude, Andreia, as a cardinal virtue. The technical difference between force and power isn’t commonly understood. As a sensory metaphor, we begin to understand force as the resistance we feel to applied muscular effort. But power is energy out, not energy input. In physics, power is the rate at which energy changes form, measured in terms of effect or work accomplished. The sense of resistance that we relate to force usually means a loss of power. It’s when things happen with less applied effort that we have power’s highest measures of efficacy. Assuming that the young lady can do something useful with her new friend, her familiar, or her totem, she is in fact more powerful than Hercules. The ‘conquest’ or repression of the lower self, of the baser instincts, or the control of our brutal and bestial natures, so often found in descriptions of this card, presents us with an inferior solution to the problem of power: it’s a deficient way of looking at things, given what might be accomplished by befriending the beast within. Strength is an integrated being, not spirit over mind or mind over body. The working parts are working together, not through control but cooperation. The beauty of this card will be missed by those still inclined to the old dualisms of matter versus the spirit, or animal nature versus higher human culture, or nature versus nurture, or libido versus superego. All of these names for our lower and higher aspects are places that parts of us fall on the fuller spectrum of who we are. Bringing all of our parts together and coaxing them into all moving in the same direction is called integrity, from integer, being one person undivided. This is a fundamental dimension of character. Consider that intelligent nature has kept life going longer than the human mind has. The beast within only wants some more intelligence, not control. The wild, unruly, dark, and primitive beast within is not that at all, and it doesn’t need to be sublimated. Humans would do far better to behave as morally as animals. Somewhat broader than fortitude as the classical virtue, this is Strength to get through the good times as well as the hardships. This is virtus, excellence, courage and worth, distinct from an artificial practice of virtue. Virtus comes also from deep down inside. It’s just too dark-aged and medieval to continue to punish brother ass for holding us back from the spirit, or to blame our devils for the failures of our angels. Great portions of our strength and motivation come from our flesh and it’s error to think of brute strength as beneath us and bestial, dark, unruly and primitive, ever ready to burst through the thin veneer of our civilization and wreak havoc on the world, with creatures from the id and libido run amok and tearing us apart. It’s probably our tameness that’s doing most of our damage. Look what civilized man has done to the savages, and the lands and life that they had preserved so well for so long. The savages fought from time to time, but they never killed thousands and millions at once. If ideology isn’t completely to blame, then it’s also what happens when we cut ourselves off from our deeper selves. The beast within is not subhuman. It only wants some intelligence, not ignorance, and not the whip. Then we cultivate this as strength. Nietzsche offers, “It is precisely as tame animals that we are a shameful sight and in need of the moral disguise.” We’ve long been wrong about who the beasts and the monsters are. They are not natural expressions of primitive life. They come from being what the Chinese would call bùdào, off the course that is proper to our original natures. Effort is an issue here, and much light is shed on this topic by Master Yoda’s advice: “Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.” There is power just in simplicity and sincerity. Few men have ever wielded the political power of Gandhi. There is power in leverage, and in being at the right place at the right time, and in pausing to take a few deep breaths, and in stepping back from overreaction to recover a little dignity. The so- called weaker sex drives half of the human economy with the power of persuasion. Martial arts like aikido can do powerful things with the effortless. And of course wu wei, the Daoist not doing, gets everything done in its time. Mary Oliver had this powerful advice: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Power here means simply to maximize or optimize the results we get for our effort. The fire itself, the force or elan that drives us all, is effortless. This is sunlight getting free again, a liberation from fuel, just happy to dance around on that log. Given all of this, it’s wise to find things to do that the whole of us wants to do, lion and lady alike. We can call this living wholeheartedly. Strength as virtus works on all of the planes of our being and can draw them all back together, finding our innate strengths and joining them into a single entity. Spirit may as easily be voluptuous and erotic. Our deepest urges, as joys of life, and even the means to make life, are holy and sacred as well. Great energy means great hunger. Sport and lustiness celebrate light just like the flame on the log. Our passions can deliver us into the heart of the mysteries. Of course we need to learn to make choices between some emotions and rule a few of them out. Jealousy costs us the thing we want to hold. Anger isn’t power or strength if it breaks things. That list goes on and on. But we make our choices by deciding what we want, and by looking at what has failed to work, by what forces have failed as power. Through this we learn Strength.