MISSIVE 32

Strength and Aquariums in the Tarot of the Real

Much strange and beautiful magic found me in the South Carolina midlands. At a macabre restaurant that made uniquely good buffalo fried oysters, I found this curious arrangement: a woman astride a rhinoceros, and beneath them both, an aquarium:

The nested painting here, of course, is a strong reflection of the drama taking place in Tarot’s Strength, and alludes, somewhat, to it becoming Lust in the Thoth tradition. The most generally known depiction of the arcanum is the form seen in the Waite-Smith, wherein a woman is seen calming a lion with divine grace:

Strength is something of a foil to the Chariot: while the latter tells a story of bridling disparate forces within the self to achieve victory, the former invites instead satiation of the uncontrolled interior for the sake of harmony with it. Given this, I was intrigued by a contrasting vision of the concept within the same arrangement.

The human body is something of an aquarium, and can even be imagined as an inverse diving suit for the ocean to explore the world outside itself. The majority of our organs are a strange coral reef beneath conscious experience, save for occasions when they need explicit maintenance. To look down and see that we are dragging the majority of our form beneath where we perceive our minds to be due to placement of the senses is dissociative, a reminder of our alienation from the unconscious aspects of being alive. Such a perspective, though often uncomfortable, is useful.

The pursuit of personal wellness cannot be fully separated from our fear of death, and we might imagine it as negotiating peace with a beast that may attack at any moment. Most of the time, however, taking care of ourselves is a simple matter of scattering food, maintaining a balanced ecosystem, and watching for signs of disease. So long as we have a reasonable approach and the necessary resources, taking care of a lion or rhinoceros is no more difficult than taking care of an aquarium full of fish. I would like to see future decks dig into that plurality of internal forces; just as there’s usually more than one fish behind the glass, the lion has organs beyond its stomach.

That being said, the drama of Strength as a card calls attention to acute matters requiring observation of the self from outside; the aquarium only adds a clarifying contrast to the substance of the arcanum. Watch for other cards in the reading to triangulate where exactly that form of abstraction is present or needed. There are inward challenges that the querent needs to be outside themselves to solve, and the minor arcana are probably best suited to materially identifying just what those are.