Writing Lessons from the Strength Tarot Card (Part 1)
If you’re a Tarot enthusiast, you probably know that 2024 adds up to the number 8, which is the Strength card. This card features a woman who looks much like the Empress either opening or closing the mouth of a lion. A flower garland snakes around the curves of her flowing white dress. An infinity sign hovers over her head like a halo.
What does this mean for our writing journey in the year ahead?
In its positive aspect this card can mean that you have the strength to face whatever you’re going through. In what I consider a shadow side, it can indicate that you need to tame your animal instincts, re-enforcing a false hierarchy of human/animal.
But I like Amanda Yates Garcia’s interpretation of the lion as our muse better. (1)
Why? Our best instincts for writing are actually just that: instincts. As the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote “there lives the dearest freshness, deep down things.” (2) That’s how I see nature, which includes humans and our desires, including the desire to write. Perhaps Amanda’s interpretation of the lion as a muse resonates with me because after both the privilege and the pain of three advanced degrees in creative writing (see The Fool card), I relate more to the lion than the woman in white.
My writing has been harshly criticized within academia and elsewhere. I took it on the chin because that’s what the toxic masculinity of the writing industry says to do. Taking feedback and revising is crucial to becoming a writer. There’s certainly truth to this as about 90% of writing is revising.
However, there is a kind way to deliver feedback that we can see in the gentle touch of the woman resting her hand on the lion’s mouth. It’s also essential to read a student’s or peer’s work closely, and consider what the piece is trying to become, rather than imposing your own will. If you are the student, extend this care to yourself even in the face of critique.
The Rider-Waite Colman-Smith version of the card with the woman and the lion illustrates soft power or power-with, as Rachel Pollack writes her book 78 Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness. (3) Previous renditions of the card emphasized dominance or power-over.
The card was originally called Force. This is from the JJ Tarot and pictures Hercules wrestling a lion he eventually kills. Wikipedia commons.
What I wish I could have told my younger self: not all feedback is meant to be taken, even if it’s given by an authority. Consider if the feedback is coming from a place of love or dominance.
I remember a time when my younger self did draw on her strength to stand by her work. I was 29 years old and in my second year at an MFA program. Like most of the students, I looked up to the professors as gods who had the power to say “yes, you’re a writer” or “no, you’re terrible.” I realize now no one has that power unless you give that to them.
I was taking a class with a professor I’d always found warm and big-hearted like a lion. But my poem “Samsara” provoked outrage from him because it didn’t do what he thought a poem should do. It wasn’t a circus lion performing well but a wild lion roaring, tearing after a gazelle on the savannah. It hurt me when he railed against the poem. It seemed to truly offend him. (4)
My true nature — my lion, my muse — said the poem was good.
She spoke in the voice of the witch — in leaping flames and tidal waves, cracked eggs and fistfuls of soil.