Three of the four cardinal virtues of classical and Christian ethics appear in the tarot: Justice, Temperance and Strength (Fortitude). The fourth, Prudence, is missing, and people have argued for centuries about whether it was lost or hidden, some suggesting the Hermit with his lantern stands in for it. Strength is the one that changed most over time. Early Italian cards showed Hercules clubbing the Nemean lion. By the Tarot de Marseille, the figure had become a woman calmly holding the lion's jaws. That shift from club to open hands is the whole teaching of the card.
A. E. Waite also moved it. In older decks Strength was card XI and Justice was VIII. Waite swapped them so the sequence would match the Golden Dawn's zodiac order, which put Strength with Leo, the lion, and with Teth, the Hebrew letter meaning "serpent." Its path is the horizontal bridge between Chesed, Mercy, and Geburah, Severity, which is the balance of kindness and force in a single line. The lemniscate over the woman's head is the same infinity sign that hovers over the Magician. The garland of roses around both woman and lion shows the method: the lion is bound with flowers, not chains.
Paul Foster Case attached one of his central teachings to this Key: the subconscious mind responds to suggestion. The lion, meaning appetite, fear, anger and every powerful instinct we have, can't be beaten into submission. Anyone who has tried to break a habit through self-punishment knows it fights back. What works is closer to training than taming, a steady, compassionate pattern offered again and again until the animal self takes it as its own. It's the most practical card in the deck, and it happens to explain why symbols repeated every day have any effect at all.
Its shadow runs in two directions. One is being ruled by the lion: rage, compulsion, appetite without a master. The other is suppression that looks like virtue, the endlessly pleasant person who has buried every strong feeling and pays for it in exhaustion or sudden explosions. What in you is roaring for attention? Are you trying to defeat it or win it over?
Strength is courage for people who don't raise their voices: the steady parent, the patient coach, the friend who stays calm in a crisis. And if Case was right that the deeper mind is trained by suggestion, the most practical thing you can do with this card is keep it in sight. The lion learns from what it sees, gently and often.
