EPISODE 11: STRENGTH
RUN TIME: 25’ 04’’
DATE: 9/18/2020
[00:00:00 Soft piano chords accompanied by light percussion, interspersed with a gentle harp and electric guitar plucking in the background. Music plays and overlaps with Sarah’s introduction.]
[00:00:03] Sarah Cargill: Welcome to Tarot for the End of Times. A podcast where we utilize the tarot as a tool to navigate through epochs of deep change.
My name is Sarah Cargill. I’m an artist, cultural worker, and your host throughout the duration of this series.
In each episode, I’ll take a look at the archetypal figures presented in the Major Arcana from the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck to discuss what each card has to say about navigating through cycles of change, chaos, and instability.
Throughout each episode, I’ll offer reflection questions and suggestions for exercises that might support you in inviting the energy and wisdom of these archetypes into your daily life and practice.
If you’d like to support this podcast and the person who makes it, you can make a monthly donation through my page on anchor.fm. Your generous act of community care and reciprocity helps me to access the resources that I need to make projects like this possible and sustainable. You can also support this work by sharing this podcast with your friends and loved ones and, most importantly, by tuning in. Thanks for joining me.
[00:01:28 Music fades, introduction ends]
Happy apocalypse, everyone. To the listeners who’ve been rockin’ with me since May, hello and thank you for returning to this conversation, for sharing this podcast with your loved ones, and for extending your generosity to me and, hopefully, to each other by sharing your reflections and contributing donations that help resource this project. Thank you all so much! If you’re new to this podcast, hey, thanks for joining us! It’s been such a delight to cultivate connection with you all. I thank you for inviting me into your reflection practice. I don’t take that trust for granted.
If you’ve made it this far in The Crumbling, then there might be something worth celebrating or, at the very least, worth noting. At the time of me preparing my notes for this episode, we are collectively experiencing two significant astrological events. Venus recently moved into the sign of Leo and Mars has gone retrograde in the sign of Aries. I don’t know about y’all, the themes of these astrological events have been front and center in my day-to-day life and the timing for this episode feels... synchronistic.
[00:02:51]
Let me begin by describing the view from my bedroom windows. My bedroom has 6 panels of windows that bless me with a view of both the sunrise and the sunset. Every morning, every evening. But this morning, the sun never rose. The blanket of ash and smoke from the California fires has cascaded upwards, carrying its density up into our atmosphere to turn our landscape into an open field of granulated rust with air so thick it needs to be swallowed. It’s the stuff of comic books and speculative fiction. It’s what I’ve always imagined Mars to look like and what I suspect Octavia Butler must have visualized when she conjured premonitions of the not-so-distant future that has, in fact, already arrived. I am one of the lucky ones. I am surviving and have the privilege to be able to observe and prepare. We are not always afforded this luxury.
Mars retrograde is a time for observation. A season to go inward to reflect on the fires that you’ve survived and started. It’s a moment to reflect on how we collectively respond to that which smolders around, within, and through us. In your most critical moments, who did you have to become to survive? Does that version of yourself still serve you? Is there another way? The Strength card, ruled by another fiery celestial body - the Sun - helps us to confront and reckon with these inquiries.
The Strength card is governed by the regal energy of Leo, a sign that rules the heart and one that I heavily associate with bloodlines and family, including families we’re born into and families we choose with our hearts. In recent weeks, I’ve noticed a post from the account @lyricalzen circulating on Instagram that calculates the number of ancestors that it took for you to arrive on this planet, in this moment. Let’s go over the calculations, shall we? It took 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, 32 third great-grandparents, all the way up to 2,048 9th great-grandparents, for you to arrive here at this moment, eating hot chips or whatever else you might be doing right now [lightly chuckles]. If you were to count back 12 generations, that makes 4,094 ancestors over the course of 400 years. Think of what your ancestors survived over all that time, over all that life. My ancestors have survived The Middle Passage, enslavement, two atomic bombings, two World Wars, Jim Crow South, being hunted, incarcerated, rounded up into concentration camps, worked to the bone, and left for dead. But I am here. And so are you. Are you starting to get a sense of the magnitude of your power, of the force that lives within and through you to make your next breath possible? Are you getting a sense of just how miraculous you are? Of the strength that’s been encoded into your DNA?
But strength is more than a mere sum of parts, yes? It’s in what we do to alchemize and rework those parts to transform our circumstances and relationship to the world. We work with strength when we choose to break generational curses. To unpack our ancestral patterning and question the destructive behaviors we’ve normalized while we - and, yes, to be clear, by “we” I mean the collective that lives within you, that lives within me - while we were busy surviving. It’s how we work with the totality of our experience to make choices that our ancestors could not make for themselves. Strength is in the courage to find other ways forward so that you have something to pass along to your descendents.
[Gentle transition music plays. Light harp and piano chords accompanied by sparse bass beats.]
[00:08:12]
Anyone who has ever intimately known someone with strong Leo placements knows that, behind the extroversion and sunny bravado, there lies a big, tender heart that longs to be held. In the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, the Strength card is illustrated with a depiction of a feminine human cradling a lion by it’s head and gently stroking its jaw. A common read for this image is that the human figure shows their strength by “subduing” the ferocious lion with her compassionate and gentle energy. However, coercion is an empty source for true power and can only churn out holograms that keep us distracted from what’s real. As a queer polyamorous femme, the idea of coersion - even “soft” coercion - leaves a bitter taste on my palette, so I’d like to offer another way for us to engage with the visual symbols assembled on this card.
The quality and energetic underpinnings of the Strength card is one of cool, calm confidence. Strength that is humble, power that is quiet. A Leo grounded in and comfortable with the totality of who they are - their light and shadow - knows that it takes work to cultivate a presence that is quiet yet impossible to ignore. The human figure in The Strength card assesses their inner strength by activating the threads that connect the parts of the heart that sense risk and trust. Heartstrings aren’t just a saccharine metaphor, they’re real, and they can break. Like any other muscle, the heart benefits from movement, stretching, opening, connecting, and conditioning. However, moving faster than, as adrienne maree brown has named, the “speed of trust” could lead to shock, trauma, disaster. A broken heart.
The Strength card is represented by the number 8 which, when turned on it’s side, transforms into the symbol for infinity. If you look closely, you’ll see that this symbol hovers over the crown of the human figure in the Strength card. It’s a self-referential symbol within the tarot, appearing a few times in the deck, bringing in new insight when paired with different archetypes.
The infinity symbol makes its first appearance in The Magician card, evoking the spirit of infinite possibilities and perpetual motion as expressed and experienced through our ever-expanding internal and external universe. With the Strength card, I read the infinity symbol as a self-perpetuating feedback loop that exists between the “self” and the “other”, the human and the lion. This feedback loop connects all beings, spirits, energies and entities that inhabit the universe and reminds us that we do not operate in separate, individualized vacuums. Within the context of both The Magician and the Strength cards, the infinity symbol serves to frame the theme of personal power. What we do, think, feel, and how we respond to one another informs what’s fed into this feedback loop. Strength, therefore, cannot be measured by the metrics of individual power, but by how one responds when confronting the best and most challenging parts of themselves as it is reflected in the other.
[00:12:22]
While The Magician is about how we use and build our personal power by working in partnership with the Universe and other larger and more dispersed energies, the Strength card reckons with how we access and become acquainted with the vibrational signature of our personal power by working in partnership with other earthly beings. Where The Magician harnesses their personal power and manifests their reality through mental, verbal, and written scripts, the archetypal pair that appears in the Strength card hones their power and manifests their reality through scripts of the heart.
Let me contextualize this with an example. When I first started seeing my therapist, she led me through a remarkably simple exercise that helped me to pin down some of the behaviors and patterns that kept me locked into disempowering and co-dependent relationship dynamics with my loved ones. To demonstrate, she drew an infinity symbol on a piece of paper, putting my initials in one side of the infinity loop and the initials of the person with whom I was having a tough time with in the other. She then asked me a few questions that helped me to articulate the basic attachment needs that weren’t being met as well as the conscious and unconscious behaviors and narratives that perpetuated this relational cycle. My heart scripts, if you will. Some of the questions sounded like, “When you are upset with so-and-so, how do you respond? What needs are you trying to have them meet? How do you respond when your needs are not met? How does so-and-so respond to you when you do this? What does that reveal about their attachment needs? What are the primary emotions (like hurt and loneliness) that drive your behaviors? How do your primary emotions reveal themselves through secondary emotions like anger and guilt?”
As she mapped my responses along the infinity loop, it became clear how my patterns of response and heart scripts triggered my loved one’s responses and scripts. By acknowledging and taking responsibility for my power within the dynamic, I was able to then recognize that my loved one is not the enemy, the dynamic is. While I cannot trade in the cards that I’ve been dealt, what I CAN locate points along the infinity continuum that IS within my power to change and rewrite. When I choose to examine, engage with, and transform disempowering and codependent patterns, I am able to use the container of my relationships to exercise and refine my relationship to my personal power in a non-coercive way.
And so, it’s not the lion itself or the human’s ability to subdue the powerful creature that signifies strength. Rather, it’s the human’s relationship to that lion as well as the depth at which the human is willing to meet themselves through the context of that relationship that tells all. We cultivate strength when we choose to examine how we yield and wield power in our relationships; that level of introspective heartwork takes courage, humility, sincerity, and care coming from all ends of the infinity continuum. The archetypal spirit of the Strength card - that fixed fire energy - brings everything that lurks in the dusty corners of our hearts into the light of day, revealing all that becomes possible when we honor the full truth of who we are when we are alone and who we become around others. The gentle interaction between the lion and the human figure in this card serves as a reminder that strength is cultivated when we treat others and allow ourselves to be treated with this level of care.
[00:17:07]
Now, let’s take a moment to chat about the difference between agency and power. There’s a narrative logic behind the succession from The Chariot to the Strength card that’s worth unpacking here. As discussed in the last episode, The Chariot card speaks to powerful decisions that align our external reality with the internal knowing that our intuition holds. This card is meant to help us get in touch with our agency, which is more or less about our capacity to exercise individual choice, yes?
The Strength card builds on this. Much like the seasonal shift that’s felt when we move from Cancer to Leo season, there is a decided shift that is felt when we move from The Chariot to the Strength card. We build personal power when we exercise our agency with care and intention. The Kaleidadope tarot deck by Krystal Banner illustrates the Strength card with the image of an arm lifting a heavy dumbbell, stretching toward a glowing infinity symbol. If we think about power as a muscle, we can understand agency to be the weight that we bear to build that muscle. Strength is the cumulative result of agency that is regularly exercised over time. By exercising our agency, we build muscles that animate and give embodied form to our inner strength. This succession is a larger reminder that there is a relationship between agency and power. When we understand and pay attention to this relationship, we become alert to the quality of our power and can gauge whether or not that power is in alignment with the integrity and principles that shape and guide our agency.
The Strength card is governed by the wisdom of the sun and is thus considered to be a masculine card. But as we are finding in our journey through the Major Arcana, gender expression isn’t as straight and narrow as it seems. While the energy of The Chariot card manifests its feminine energy through masculine expression, I find that the Strength card manifests masculine energy through feminine expression. Leo energy is emotive and heart-centered and asserts strength through creative self-expression. With this in mind, it’s important to remember that the Strength card isn’t just about the power to knock down, destroy, or push through obstacles, but also about our power to build and create.
True confidence and power - much like trust and generosity - is expressed quietly. When the Strength card appears upright in your spread, it affirms and reflects this quality of quiet, regal calm, perseverance, and inner strength that you embody at this time. In the face of upheaval and change, the Strength card encourages you to let your heart take the lead and trust that it knows the way forward.
Insecurity, on the other hand, is quite loud, yes? One only needs but a few moments to compile a list of examples, but that’s not the kind of scathing read I’m here to deliver onto you today, dear listeners [lightly laughs]. When the Strength card appears in reverse, we’re called to examine the tender parts of ourselves that we attempt to cover up with bravado and force. This card in reverse asks: Who are you trying to convince with all that noise and who do you think you’re fooling? Similarly to Mars retrograde season, the Strength card in reverse strongly encourages us to reckon with the parts of ourselves that deeply craves external validation. Just because your heart is the size of your fist doesn’t mean that it’s wise to use it like one. How will you honor what’s true for you in ways that make space for what’s true for others?
[00:21:51]
This inverted energy is also an invitation to examine the emotional boundaries that your heart needs to quiet those insecurities. In what ways and to what extent have unsolicited critique and projection uprooted your confidence? What does it reveal about the state of your emotional boundaries? When our hearts are too porous, we unknowingly give our power away to the opinions, egos, and holograms of others. In what ways can your emotional boundaries help you to become unabashedly upfront about the truths that live in your heart? We can reclaim our power by activating our agency through honest self-reflection and some good ol’ fashioned boundary-setting.
Lastly, this card in reverse reminds us of the influence we have in the lives and hearts of those around us. Sometimes, this inverted energy can indicate that we’ve lost touch with our internal barometer that senses the depth of our impact on others. When our ego and sense of self-importance eclipses the reality of the situation, we can get lost in our own experience and actually underrate the potency of our power. So, yes, over-inflated self-importance can look like excessive bravado and baseless confidence, but it can also look like underestimating and being oblivious to the impact we have on others.
As we come to a close, I invite you to invoke the spirit of the Strength card by getting familiar with your heart language. One way to do this is by actively noting and naming your triggers and glimmers. Triggers are what activates our nervous system to fight, freeze or run away, while glimmers activate our sense of safety, joy, giddiness and connection. There’s a ton of discussion around why it’s important to know what our emotional triggers are, but it’s just as important to familiarize ourselves with our glimmers so we’re equipped to recognize what safety and connection actually feels like in our bodies and we can learn to trust that feeling. This is the sensory technology of your heart, and it’s a critical compass for navigating change. Thanks for listening, and may you be guided by the wisdom of your heart.
[00:24:48 Outro music fades in, plays until the end]