Leo, from the twenty third of July to the twenty second of August, gets Strength, and the card is not what the name suggests.
It shows a woman closing a lion’s mouth with her bare hands and a completely calm face. Nothing is being overpowered. Something large is being handled gently, and that is the whole teaching.
Why Strength belongs to Leo
The lion is the obvious link and the shallow one. The better link is that the card is not the lion, it is the person with the lion, and Leo is at its best when it is managing something powerful rather than being it.
Read that way, Strength becomes a card about restraint from a person who has plenty of force available. The Strength page has more on how the card changes when it is reversed, which is usually about pressure applied where patience was needed.
The court card: the King of Wands
Fixed fire in the court is the King of Wands, sitting forward on his throne with a salamander on his cloak, more interested in the next thing than in the ceremony he is currently in.
Together with Strength he describes somebody who leads by warmth, who is genuinely generous, and who occasionally forgets that not everyone can run at that speed.
Leo in love
Warm, demonstrative, and much more sensitive than the volume implies. The lion in the card is the tender part, not the loud part, and Leo in love feels slights that nobody else in the room registered.
Strength here suggests the same thing it always suggests: handle it gently. Including the version of it that lives in you, which is usually hungrier for reassurance than it will ever admit.
Leo at work
Natural at the front of a room, good at making other people feel like the work matters, and often carrying more than anyone realizes because complaining feels like a poor performance.
The card’s question at work is what happens when the applause stops. Leo does its best work for people it respects, and its worst work when the only reward on offer is being seen.
One card is a sketch
For something closer to your own life than to the month you were born in, the birth card calculator takes about ten seconds.
And you do not have to be the warm one every single day. Nobody would even notice if you took Thursday off from it.
Questions people ask
Is Strength card number eight or eleven?
Both, depending on the deck. Older decks put Justice at eight and Strength at eleven, and the Rider Waite Smith swapped them to line up with the zodiac. The meaning does not change either way.
Does Strength mean being tough?
It means the opposite of force. The woman in the picture is closing a lion’s mouth with her hands and a calm face, and every version of the card is about patience being stronger than pressure.
Why is Leo associated with a lion beyond the obvious?
The obvious part is real, and the more interesting link is that the card is not the lion. It is the person with the lion, which is a better description of the sign than the animal on its own.