Strength

Strength and Justice have exchanged numbers, and knowing which system a deck belongs to is the difference between reading it and guessing at it.

In the older Italian and French patterns, Justice is VIII and Strength is XI. That is the arrangement in the Marseille pattern and in most decks descended from it. The Golden Dawn reversed them, and Waite followed, so that in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck and the very large family of decks modelled on it Strength is VIII and Justice is XI.

The reason is astrological and specific. The order's system runs the trumps against the zodiac in sequence, and it wanted Strength to fall on Leo and Justice on Libra. With the older numbering the signs land the wrong way round. Swapping the two cards fixes the correspondence table at the cost of altering a numbering that had been stable for three centuries. Waite made the change deliberately and Crowley kept it, renaming the card Lust.

There is a minor historical footnote: the fifteenth-century Sola Busca deck also places the strength figure at the eighth position, so the arrangement is not unprecedented. That is not evidence that the Golden Dawn was restoring anything, and it should not be presented as such. It is a coincidence of one unusual deck.

The practical consequence is that any table of correspondences, any book, and any statement about "the eighth trump" is ambiguous until the system is named. Both numberings are in wide use today and neither is wrong, but they cannot both be applied to the same deck. This is the clearest available demonstration that the tarot's occult apparatus was assembled rather than inherited: a scheme built in the 1890s required two cards to change places, and they did.

The image is more consistent than the numbering. In the French pattern La Force is a woman in a wide-brimmed hat closing or opening a lion's jaws with her hands, calmly and without apparent effort. Some earlier Italian versions show a male figure with a club, closer to Hercules and the Nemean lion, and the shift from a man with a weapon to a woman with her bare hands is the most interesting thing about the card's history. Whenever it happened, and it was well before the occultists, it changed the card from a picture of prowess into a picture of something harder to name.

The Golden Dawn assigned it the letter Teth, the sign Leo, and the nineteenth path from Chesed to Geburah. Teth is traditionally read as a serpent, and the coiling form of the letter is often connected to the lemniscate that Pamela Colman Smith drew above the woman's head in 1909. Crowley's version, retitled Lust, keeps Leo but reads the card as the joyful acceptance of appetite rather than its restraint, which is a substantial reinterpretation and a specifically Thelemic one.

Ordinary reading practice runs to courage, patience, self-mastery, and influence exercised without force, the persuading of a strong thing rather than the beating of it. The critical readings run to force disguised as gentleness, endurance carried past the point of sense, and appetite denied so long that it becomes the whole problem. Waite files those under reversal; many readers find them in the upright card when the spread is bleak.