Symbolism of the Strength tarot card

The Woman in white is directing the Lion to her will. The power of shakti, the power of strength, also known as kundalini is usually working through the subconscious levels. It is the power of life. It renews every single cell of your body. It renews and heals every aspect of you through the subconscious level.

It's only with alchemy or with yoga that this power is consciously manipulated to accelerate evolution. But it is the purified subconscious, the tainted subconscious cannot touch this, as it would burn itself or would hurt itself.

The Green Lion

The Lion is the ruler of the Animal Kingdom, it represents the summit of the animal kingdom and all other kingdoms beneath it, the vegetable and mineral kingdoms. All of physical life before humanity.

The Green Lion is photosynthesis. Plants have the ability to turn sunlight into substance. They take the radiant energy streaming from the stars and from our own particular daystar the sun, they make form, they make bodies, holding that solar energy. And all other lifeforms derive a lot of their energy from eating the vegetable kingdom. Or from eating animals that have in turn eaten from the vegetable kingdom.

The Green Lion, the force of life in its ordinary state.

The Red / Gold Lion

But when it is deliberately concentrated upon, deliberately focused and sublimated, to bring to great intensity, the Red or Gold Lion represents the Kundalini force. In the east the Red/Gold Lion is symbolized by a tiger.

Skillfully direct the fire of life.

 

Amazing how a cartoon made to sell toys has such powerful symbolism. "I have the power" to turn the Green Lion with Gold potential into the Red (= same to Gold) Lion.

The garland of roses is the secret of the power of the White Woman over the Lion. She has a symbol of infinity over her head. The garland of roses around her and the Lion make up the same infinity symbol. It is also the symbol for the Holy Spirit. The symbol in the Christian tradition for the Kundalini.

The Father is the Superconsciousness, maker of all things visible and invisible. The Son is the self-consciousness, the waking self. The Holy Spirit that unites the two is the Subconscious which is the vehicle of Shakti.

The relation of the subconsciousness and the kundalini must be based on Love. There must be a trust, an intimacy, a caring for each other. This constitutes the skilled working. The Great Work isn't completed by violence, it's not done through harsh regimes of self-denial, of fasting, of unnatural practices that hurt the body. It's not done by philosophies that encourage and warp the suboncious mind by feelings of either disempowerment or elitism. The path of evolution is wholeness.

Where alchemy, like the forms of yoga is fearless, is that it takes the entire human being onboard. Nothing about the human being is rejected. Because it's recognized that all aspects of the human being are essentially sacred.

This is the love that is fearless, it shrinks for nothing. Because it knows itself to be at one with everything else, no matter how unpleasant the masks may be that present themselves before it. True spiritual growth is the path of wholeness and becoming one with the whole. Not saying these people I don't want, these things I don't want, I don't like that kind of thing or even or person. It's recognizing oneness with all that is.

This power is the fiery chariot.

Words by David Goddard - Symbolism of the Tarot (MP3 series).