The Greater Trumps: (11) Strength

In some representations of Strength, he is Heracles, the Lady's own champion, clad in the skin of the Nemaean Lion. The dead beast's skull is his helm. He has mastered the untameable by breaking its neck; he has taken its totemic power for his own. And now, he sees no challenges before him - the mastery of challenge has left the champion bereft. Or perhaps, he is his own master, and the circle is closed.

In most representations of Strength, however, she is Koré - the ever-virginal, the Maiden. The Lion is very much alive, but her gentle hands are stroking its jaws, and the jaws are either closing or opening at her persuasion. Innocent belief, coupled with the will towards mastery, has achieved the impossible. This is another kind of strength, the strength of innocence which calms the savage beast.

Either of these representations reveals that Strength is not about strength, really, but about Discipline and Mastery. Whereas the Chariot unites opposites, pitting them against each other until a useful outcome is produced, Strength pits the inner self against an external challenge, and balance is attained when both come to an agreement. So both Heracles and Koré become the Lion, in a metaphorical sense, and in doing so, harness energy for their future tasks.

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The funny thing is that in the same year of my life, I read W H Auden, Dylan Thomas, G M Hopkins and Wilfred Owen. Those of you who went through the same English Literature course will remember it. Along the way, our encounter with Auden revealed a very disciplined poet whose mastery of language was too great. Because he was able to select the exactly appropriate word for each line, and select them all with ironic (and sometimes bitter) wit, he was sometimes thought to be trite; he was often seen as a facile dabbler, an amateur who played too much. Yet on deeper digging, one finds the oddly rueful and pathetic:

Our earth in 1969
Is not the planet I call mine,
The world, I mean, that gives me strength
To hold off chaos at arm's length.

My Eden landscapes and their climes
Are constructs from Edwardian times,
When bath-rooms took up lots of space,
And, before eating, one said Grace.

This is strength drawn from the ambience of tradition, from the comfort of the surroundings which generate affection. But there are those who find strength in more heroic vein, and here, as most would, I must quote a far less cynical (but not less powerful) poet - Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Strength - whether of the desperate, urgent kind or of the gentler and more reflective kind - is the mark of the heroic. And as Ulysses looks into the twilight, he sees where that strength can yet lead him.