The Lot of Courage, kleros tolmes, is the lot of Mars in the Hermetic set, built on the Lot of Fortune. Tolma in Greek carries daring and boldness with an edge of recklessness, and the lot is read for force, audacity, the manner in which a person meets conflict and risk, and, in the harsher readings of the Hellenistic authors, for violence and for trouble brought on by rashness. Paulus gives it among the seven, and Valens uses it in judging the temper and the circumstances of struggle. Because it is built on Fortune it belongs to the material and circumstantial side of the scheme, so it describes the conditions in which boldness is exercised rather than a moral quality; the lots are not virtues, and reading them as such is a modern import.
The day formula is Ascendant plus Fortune minus Mars; by night the terms reverse, Ascendant plus Mars minus Fortune. Courage's construction from Fortune rather than Spirit places it, like Necessity, among the lots concerned with circumstance and the body's condition rather than with the deliberate will, so that classical delineation reads it less as a measure of chosen bravery than of the conditions, favourable or dangerous, under which a person is forced to act boldly or recklessly, a distinction easy to lose in modern popular treatments that read the lot simply as a courage score.