By Lee Harrington
In the 1909 deck painted by Pamela Coleman Smith and designed by Arthur Edward Waite, the major arcana dances across the fool’s journey. A white person conventionally read as a woman in a white gown lays her hand upon a lion with a thick mane, tongue lolling out of its mouth as it gazes up at her. With the lion’s tail tucked between its legs, the woman’s gaze is soft, her green wreath dotted with red flowers draped around her. Overhead, an infinity symbol hangs close to her crown, and soft greenery lays behind her as well as one far-off mountain.
Before this deck, this image was known as Fortitude. It was also traditionally the 11th card, with Waite having changed the order based on astrological associations within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Going back to the 1400s, this card was sometimes depicted as a woman breaking or holding a stone pillar, or the genders changed back and forth on who was subduing the lion. Artists likely chose the concept of what fortitude looked like based on their cultural biases, their perceptions of gender, their story, and their understanding of tradition.
I have struggled with the Strength card over the years, even in its manifestation as Fortitude. As a queer transgender person who has been a sex worker, and a person with often invisible disabilities, the soft image shown in the Smith-Waite deck often struck me as inspiration porn. So often women, people of colour, folks with disabilities, queer individuals, and transgender people are given lip service of “oh, aren’t you so brave” for simply living their life. This is not a choice. It takes strength, it takes fortitude, to simply be. But I am not a creature who has subdued the beast – I live in and fight the beast known as culture every day.
Lee Harrington Guest Post Queer Tarot Project
Along comes the Whore of Babylon. Lady Freida Harris and Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot Deck, created between 1938 and 1943, shows as its 11th card not Fortitude, but Lust. Riding atop her many-headed scarlet beast, she is Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Prostitutes and Abominations of the Earth. Depicted nude, in contrast to her biblical description, cloaked in purple and scarlet, wearing gold, pearls, and precious gems, her power is not lessened by the exposure of her skin. She is the carrier of filth and fornication, and is drunk with the blood of the saints.
Having done a variety of sex work, from empowered professional domination to direct service out of pure need, the Whore of Babylon has always been a powerful icon for me. Assigned female at birth, I also identified as a dyke and lesbian at different windows of my life—an identity that would have worn a black triangle right alongside sex workers. She spoke to me— the avatar of powerful women intertwined, a woman powerful whole and unto herself, unreliant on and apathetic towards the existence of a man.
I found myself wondering—what if the lion subdued in the images of strength and fortitude was not the idea of a softened beast, but instead, the embodiment of the power to thrive in the face of monsters? What if two-spirit, intersex, trans, agender, queer, asexual, bisexual, lesbian, gay, kinky, and the array of other people deemed monsters by culture due to their gender, orientation, or identity are Strength, are Fortitude, and rise up above the multitude? What if it is our Judgement in the future that will show the monster of meta culture the harm it has done and awaken a World yet to come?
Lust becomes our power. In “Le Tarot des Femmes Erotiques,” the translation offered under a nude woman feeding a swan is “Courage from Passion.” Lust for life, lust between the sheets, lust for justice—these become desire rather than destruction, passion rather than addiction, strength rather than the toxicity of faiths that vilify lust as inherently harmful. Lust becomes our fight against a world that tries to desexualize us in the name of acceptability.
In examining my own path in and through queerness, I have been told that my desires are inherently destructive, that my passions are clearly addictions, that my strength is toxic. I have been labeled lustful for something as simple as a kiss between men on the side of the road, eggs thrown and slurs escaping the lips of hate. But my strength and fortitude are buttressed by my desire and connection with others—community-building friends, long-term lovers, and hook ups in dance club bathrooms alike. Some who even cross over between arbitrary labels and lines.
Not only do historical versions of the tarot show us possibilities beyond the (read as) woman in white, but modern ones that approach this do as well. In “Prisma Visions Tarot” by James R. Eads, the (read as) woman is nowhere to be seen, and a pride of maned lions roar at a predator or threat. Male lions do not traditionally gather together and instead are territorial, reminding me of the infighting between our communities, especially the most marginalized among us, that nevertheless sometimes come together in times of need. Or, perhaps these maned lions are like the five in Botswana who have grown manes, changed their behaviours, and become gender journeyers themselves.
Meanwhile, “Fifth Spirit Tarot” by Charlie Claire Burgess shows a person in cream overalls kneeling outside next to their dog who has been taken off not just leash, but collar as well. Their own knees say LOVE and TRUST, and peership is depicted between the figures (tail up) rather than fear (tail between legs). Connection and camaraderie paint an ideal of strength for queer individuals and communities alike, along with a fortitude shown by the bags under the kneeling figure’s eyes and an off-kilter infinity symbol shown in white that is queered in its position compared to the Smith-Waite deck.
One last modern deck offers us another twist, especially for me as a person who has danced with a medical journey within my transgender adventure. In “A Queerer Tarot,” Wallace Crehan opens up Strength to be the 9th card in the deck, a space classically held by the Hermit. At first this struck me as arbitrary—Crehan had replaced or renamed many cards throughout the deck, and re-ordered much of the major arcana. And then, it hit me. How many people across a queer spectrum of gender, identity, and orientation have had to do their work alone? Have struggled for years or decades with their desires, or suddenly have had to face the new information they learned about themselves. Shown with a prescription pill bottle and two types of pills laid out, we can read this as the strength to medically shape-shift, or the dark side of lust from the addiction issues in our communities. For some people, this might also read as the fortitude to not take pills that might end our lives.
Strength. Fortitude. Lust. These many faces can show the many faces of our community, and of us as individuals. Knowing this, I turn back to reexamine the Smith-Waite deck. What if the softness of the gown is the power of femme identity? What if the blonde is a trans woman finding her way, with infinite patience and infinite strength alike? What if the lion gave in because the tongue lolling out was from a sweaty day at Pride where we remembered that Pride was a protest and that folks in leather have always been there? What if we found our own safe pastures, and together filled our hearts with fortitude through supporting each other.
Thanks SO much to Lee for this powerful article! I’m grateful to feature other witchy queers and their writings about Tarot and Queerness to share with you all. You can find more about Lee here at his links below.
