the balancing act of lust, and other things the Tarot teaches me

some ideas about the Strength card in the Major Arcana

It is hot, and so humid that by 10 am my hair is a frizzy halo. By 10:39 I have been pushed from the garden into the cool cave of my ground floor apartment, an apartment that stays so cold in the winter a bouquet of store-bought lilies lasted through all of February and into March, preserved by the relentless chill I now relish. My glasses, which I have only just started to need as though my eyes suddenly got the memo that I am now in my 40s, are stained with the humidity. The world is so steamy I quite literally can’t see straight.

I am eating only red fruits. A bowl of fragrant strawberries from the farm down the road. Last summer’s raspberries plucked from the freezer and blended with sugar and ice. A bowl of cherries, glowing like rubies, that must be in season somewhere because the grocery store has marked them down to such a degree that my New England upbringing didn’t balk at the idea of buying fruit when we have a freezer full of last year’s harvests. But how could I resist these perfect cherries, the slight crack of their skin as they give way to my teeth, juice flooding my mouth.

Tell me the world isn’t made of lust and longing. Tell me there isn’t strength in this.

I'm currently just beyond halfway through teaching a year-long class on the Tarot. It’s the second time I’ve taught this class - the first time was in 2021. In lived experience, 2021 was a century ago. So, not surprisingly, I am continually amazed by new realizations the cards are offering as I teach. But to be honest, the cards can do that even from one day to the next. When diving into the Tarot, there’s no bottom, only deepening. Like evolution in reverse, I find myself becoming more and more adept and comfortable in the murky depths as the years pass. This is the gift of the Tarot.

Now that we’re past the middle of the year, we’ve gone through one of the Tarot’s most contested differences. You see: the Tarot is made of two primary parts: the Major and Minor Arcana (from the Latin Arcanum: secrets). The Minor Arcana is made of 4 suits: cups, wands, swords, and pentacles, and similar to a regular deck of playing cards, each suit moves from an ace to a King. The Major Arcana is made of 22 cards, each with a name and number, beginning with 0, The Fool, and moving through card 21, often called The World card. I say “often” because there are many different decks, offering their unique take on the cards, and many take liberties in changing the name of certain cards. The World card might be called The Universe, or in the deck I created, The Somatic Tarot, I renamed it as The Multiverse. But while the names might change slightly, the order does not. Each card holds its place in order, beginning with 0, until 21. 

Except, that isn’t quite exactly true.

The Tarot has a fuzzy origin story; no one is entirely certain where it came from, although many people have their strong opinions. And while there are many different decks, there are only a few classic ones. 

The Tarot de Mersailles is, if not the original, the oldest known deck. Some historians believe it originated in the 14th century, and others believe it originated in the first century. In that deck, the Major Arcana places Justice as card 8, and Strength as card 11. This is also the order of the cards in the Thoth deck, another classic deck, which was created in the 1940s by Alistair Crowley. But in the early 20th century Arthur Edward Waite created, along with Pamela Colman Smith’s illustrations, what is often called in Tarot circles the Rider Waite Deck, naming the publisher and male author, forgetting the woman who made the images. (Make note: femme erasure). It is by far the most popular Tarot deck, the one even people who don’t know the Tarot will recognize. It is the gold standard most modern decks and readers follow, and that almost all books on the Tarot reference. And in that deck, Waite changed the order of those two cards, “for reasons sufficient unto myself” aka he never explained it. In fact, he wrote that “as the variation carries nothing which will signify to the reader there is no cause for explanation.” Waite moved Strength to Card 8, and Justice to Card 11. 

Since Waite himself didn’t explain, one theory is that it was to make it fit the astrological calendar (so Libra: Justice would come after Leo: Strength, just as Libra comes at the beginning of autumn, after the high summer sign of Leo). There are other theories that this is the result of secret societies of magic and the occult that Waite was part of in the 1920s in England. But we can’t know for sure, because he didn’t tell us.

The part of me that is absolutely exhausted by white men saying they changed a thing because they felt like it has always rejected this change. But as a poet who embraces anyone making a creative choice because it feels right, I can love it even if I am annoyed by it. I am large, I contain multitudes, like Whitman said, and recently I have been trying to take a note from Whitman and concern myself more with seeing the universe in a single blade of grass than with allowing my ire to be raised by long-dead white men. It is difficult to do, considering everything we are currently navigating. I continue to practice.

Rachel Pollack writes in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Book of Tarot (the book I always recommend when someone asks for a book about the Tarot) about his switch. She’s in favor. She sees the poetry of Justice as card 11, a number that reflects itself, one against one, the balance created by placing the scales in the middle of the Major Arcana. She writes about this change with clarity and depth. Her explanation of this switch makes it beautiful. She briefly explores the old arrangement of cards, with Strength in the middle of the story, and finds it lacking.

Nothing anyone writes about the Tarot can ever be “wrong” because the Tarot doesn’t deal in absolutes. Remember that, please, if what I’m about to write ruffles your feathers.

I don’t agree with her.

And while a younger version of myself would have felt the need to defend this, to make Pollack wrong so that I could be right, the gift of this many years with the Tarot (and with a collection of excellent therapists) is that I don’t feel the need for either of these stories to be “right”. I do, however, think there is benefit in exploring what we might learn from the story Pollack refuses – that of Strength in the middle of the story of the Major Arcana. Even better, I think we can learn quite a lot from the story offered by Crowley’s Thoth deck, where Strength remains the middle, but is renamed as Lust. After all, if we’re going to give credence to the changes one white man made to an occult system of divination, why not explore the changes another white man made as well? 

I first learned Tarot from the Thoth deck. It wasn’t my only option. My aunt passed away and I inherited her stack of decks and books on numerology and Tarot. It’s her old copy of Seventy-Eight Degrees that I am now underlining and dog-earring, and because she did the same, it is as though we are having a conversation even more than a decade after her passing. Along with her Vitamix and a collection of brass singing bowls, she left me her Rider Waite Smith deck, her Thoth deck, and several others that have since found their ways to other people, or into the mysteries that sacred objects go when they go missing, likely encouraged to disappear, no doubt, by my countless moves and frequent long road trips in the years immediately following her death.

It was the Thoth deck that captured me, and it was my aunt’s copy of Angles Arrien’s The Tarot Handbook, a thick and unwieldy book, that I began to travel everywhere with. A strange choice, considering the size of that book and my aforementioned total groundlessness in that era, but my hitchhiking backpack and roadtripping cars have always been weighed down by books.

In the Lust card of the Thoth deck, similarly to the Strength illustration by Smith, there is a woman and a lion. In the Smith illustration  she is beatific, an infinity symbol above her head like an angelic halo, a full grown lion comes barely up to her hips in the folds of her flower covered gown, his tongue panting like a dog as she holds his jaws. In the Thoth deck, the woman rides a lion, if we can even call it that, with rippling golden muscles and multiple heads of both men and beasts. She is naked, back arched and hair streaming behind her, tugging on the lion’s reins with one hand, the other holding a red chalice, or maybe it is magma, up from the underground to where the light catches it and ten snakes, or are they horns, move towards it. The somatic lens with which I view the world can easily make this chalice a womb, the snakes or horns that are coming towards the light are spermatozoa touching the membrane of the ovum– this is a version of the creation story that the Church would decry as blasphemy. Interesting, then, that of the seven deadly sins, only Lust is named in the Thoth deck, and it is named as Strength.

I pause in my writing to send a suggestive photo of my lips and a cherry to a lover. “Have you ever thought about what a cherry looks like?” I ask.

Lust, that forbidden sin, is taught to us as something to be controlled. If there is Strength involved, it is the strength required to constrain our more base desires. For those of us cultured into femininity, this becomes even more complex: we are taught that we should be desirable, but we should be careful not to be too desirable, lest we be asking for it, and our desires should always center the pleasure of men. And if we are queer, and were or currently are closeted, then we have learned that our desires must be kept hidden. Shameful. Underground. 

But somehow, like the chalice held up to the light by the naked woman on the Thoth card, lust always seems to rise to the surface.

There is strength here, in the lust and longing. All I have to do is look around at the garden rippling in the heat to be affirmed of this, pollen and pollinators filling the hazy air. Sex is everywhere, especially in the thick heat of summer. All I have to do is feel the power rippling in my own body knowing that I have once again caused my lover’s heart to beat faster by interrupting their day with a suggestive photo. It’s a game, a play of power that weaves us into intimacy. There’s strength here. There’s unabashed aliveness, in both pollen and flirtation. 

Pollack writes eloquently about the balance exhibited by Justice in the center position of the Major Arcana – the scales of Justice representing the tension between who we were and who we are becoming, and the balance of past and future required for an awakened present. And because there are no absolutes in the Tarot, and very few in life in general, we can embrace the beauty of that story while exploring the beauty of this other one. The books and readers who ascribe to that story certainly aren’t wrong. And: what can we learn from the story offered in other decks, where Strength is what lives in the balance, in that tension between past and future? What can we learn in particular if we look to the story offered by the Thoth deck, where Lust lives in the middle? What can we learn from a story that tells us Lust is what we must learn to balance?

I grew up in New England, with puritanical history and the ashes of witches seeping out of the hillsides in ways that clash with the gay enclaves in my state, Provincetown on one end, Northampton on the other. I was raised by a Methodist minister who abandoned his family for another woman. I grew up with confusing crushes in an era when “bisexual” was a dirty word. I have friends, both queer and straight, that I have to come out to constantly, who are somehow always shocked when I refer to a romantic interest with a pronoun other than “he”, and I alternate between rolling my eyes and blushing every time, because internalized biphobia is a knot that can be tricky to untangle. All of this is to say: I have a difficult relationship with lust. It is simultaneously something I fear and crave, and embracing my own has given me a delicious power and also has made me, more than once, into a target, hunted by some, ostracized by others. This is the tiring story of what it means to be a queer femme: damned if we do, damned if we don’t, an endless effort expected of us to find the balance that will save us. As Audre Lorde writes in her essay The Uses of the Erotic, “We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society. On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence.”

The aliveness lives in what exists beyond that story, the way that to be a queer femme invites us into playful curiosity with what it means to desire, and to be desired. As Lorde goes on to write in that essay, “But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.” There is a deep power that comes from embracing desire as a force. There’s obvious tension here, in embracing a force that left unchecked could easily endanger you. While I love to envision a world where desire and sensuality aren’t policed, I still have to live in this world, in which they are. 

And so I resonate with the idea of Strength/Lust being in the middle of the story, and everything Pollack writes about the tension of the middle of the story of the Major Arcana – the soul’s journey - still works. Pollack says Justice speaks to a constant reckoning, a reflection of our own individual responsibility and the way it interacts with the context that holds us, and Lust certainly requires that in my own lived experience. As Pollack writes in describing Justice: “We have spoken of the world as a great interplay of opposites, a constantly turning wheel of light and dark, life and death. We have also said that at the center of the wheel is the stationary point around which the opposites endlessly revolve...When we find the center of our lives, everything comes into balance. When all the opposites, including past and future, come into balance we are able to be free within ourselves.” Pollack is referring to Justice here, but isn’t Lust asking us to do the same thing? To hold the stillpoint at the center while past and present swirl around us, while light and dark continue to mix in ways that can sometimes feel impossible to decipher. If sexuality and sensuality and passion are engaged with in ways that do not simply toe the line of the status quo, then balancing this tension is a constant dance. As Lorde wrote in that same essay. “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”

As my eyes are reminding me, I am now in my 40s. Middle-aged. I am single, childless, and happy about both those things – though that would get my therapist a 5-star review on Yelp, if therapists had Yelp pages (perhaps they should). One of my uncles frequently remarks on the difference between my circumstances and his mother’s: she was married before she even officially graduated from college and had 12 babies in 20 years. I dropped out of high school and spent 10 years traveling the world before going to that same college and graduating at age 30, and I have no plans to have children and an ever-decreasing interest in getting married. My lifestyle would have been unheard of not too long ago, when women couldn’t open their own bank account or have a credit card. My lifestyle is still under attack, even if I feel protected in my liberal state, the same one with the ashes of burned witches lingering in the forests that used to be fields.

So stitched into the very fabric of my life is this balancing act Pollack writes about, the tension between what was and what will be. I can find it by looking at my grandmother’s life and my own. I can find it by looking back at the first half of my life and considering what the next half (if I’m lucky) will become. And I am enjoying the playfulness of holding this balance in light of Strength/Lust, rather than the austerity of Justice. After all, as Pollack herself writes, “Unless we truly believe the process of self-discovery is a joyous one we will never follow it through.”

Released just this year, Red Tarot: A Decolonial Guide to Divinatory Literacy by Christopher Marmolejo follows the pattern created by Waite, with Strength as card 8, but when I read what Marmolejo writes, I find myself anchored yet again to this idea of Strength as Lust, at the center of the story: “She, Strength, welcomes us, of her sound integrity, to meet rapture with her. Strength brings our sex out of exile and, like the lion, extends permission to enter the energetic exchange of bodies. This invitation collapses the feeling of separateness. The amount of pleasure we allow ourselves to receive is dependent upon our sense of dignity. Strength embraces the dignity of pleasure, espouses our inherent worthiness of love’s pleasure as an erotic ecology.  It says I am supposed to access the fullness of feeling; I deserve love. This is supposed to feel good.”

The Tarot speaks of iterative becomings; what happens once cannot be forgotten but must be continually repeated. Justice doesn’t end at card 8, but must continue on throughout the rest of the story. What becomes possible if the effort required to maintain our efforts for Justice is supposed to feel good? And what if our Lust is a source of Strength as we renew our efforts to build a just world? What becomes possible if our Lust is no longer a dirty sin, or a distraction meant only for when we are not busy with more “important” things? I’m certainly not the first person to ask this question - Audre Lorde asked it, and adrienne maree brown’s book Pleasure Activism explores that question in detail and through many voices. So I’m saying: what can these old and mysterious stories of the Tarot teach us about these necessary questions, especially now, when joy and pleasure can feel painfully out of reach, and the same phone I use to send flirty photos also shows me countless horrors and headless children?

If we follow the original story that has Justice as card 8 and Strength as card 11, then the Tarot shows us that without Justice we will never know a liberated Lust; dismantling the laws and dogma that keep us restrained allows us the freedom to explore what gives us pleasure, what we want, and who we want to be wanted by. But without Lust, without raw and bone-deep pleasure, I am unsure of my, your, our follow-through in the efforts necessary to continue our efforts to build Justice.

I created The Somatic Tarot in 2018. If 2021 feels like a century ago, 2018 feels like eons. My relationship to the Tarot, and to myself, and to life in general, has shifted in the last six years, and now as I revise the deck for its next release I find myself wondering if I will keep the story of Strength the same. In The Somatic Tarot I kept Strength as card 11, but I envisioned it as communal: Strength is found in community, both human and more-than-human. I was spending more time with trees than people as I created the deck, so I listened to them: how the stories of their competition are false, how they create interdependent, interspecies communities, how they reach for and talk with each other through scent and other signals. (Those explorations and conversations also went on to become a major theme in Returning Home to Our Bodies, my book that was released in January 2024).

Of course, as the pollen and pollinators are reminding me today, the forest and trees are also filled with Lust. So perhaps I will keep the story the same, after all.

Ester Perel, the renowned Belgian-American psychotherapist whose work often focuses on love and desire,  writes about lust and desire as an invitation to be in paradox, that “modern relationships are cauldrons of contradictory longings: safety and excitement, grounding and transcendence, the comfort of love and the heat of passion….Reconciling the domestic and the erotic is a delicate balancing act that we achieve intermittently at best. Separateness and togetherness alternate in point and counterpoint. We need both, but it’s an intricate dance.”

The balance required by embodied, empowered Lust is a delicate one, and it is one that requires great Strength to achieve. Learning from the stories offered by the Tarot, it requires the willingness to be present with the cycles of life, the ebb and flow of togetherness and separateness, the need for space and the need for closeness, that we can find through The Wheel of Fortune (card 10). The playfulness and heat of Strength/Lust might help make the complete release required by The Hanged Man (card 12) more enjoyable, or we might be catapulted into a new way of perceiving ourselves and the world around us through the alchemy of love – of seeing ourselves reflected in another, of having to exert effort to remain in the present, rather than pulled into the future by our desires. “I want you” is a pull from the present, a projection into some future moment, a naming of a current need not met. What changes in our experience of lust when we exert the necessary strength to remain present in ourselves, even when swept into the desire for another? 

I certainly have to ask myself that question when my phone chimes with the gift of my cherry photo being reciprocated.

Lust can certainly pull us out of ourselves; it requires Strength to remain present within the tension of desire. The balance in this middle card of the Tarot, whether it is Strength or Justice, is to remain present and informed by the past, excited and hopefully delighted by the future, but engaged and embodied in the present. When this balance point is offered by Strength/Lust, we are invited back into ourselves, into these bodies that want and desire. In this present moment, we are continually in the dance of creation, and it is not a sin. 

An embodiment of any desire that does not align with the straight and cis status quo is a work of Justice. We are building the world we long for, and that includes a world where we can love in ways that are liberated, in ways that heal, and - I dream of this for future generations - perhaps where healing doesn’t have to be the focus of our loving. So these stories of Strength and Justice do not need to compete with each other. Like the trees teach us, competition is an outdated story. An ecosystem is complex and layered - the stories that can guide us into a complicated future must be as well. 

Perhaps the reason I resonate so strongly with the story offered by the Thoth deck is that it is the one I learned first, lugging that giant Tarot Handbook around various countries and reading those cards in all manner of places. Perhaps it is because I see my own sexuality reflected by a story that places Lust in the middle; bisexual has never meant to me that I make my choices between the two choices of man and woman, but rather that I do not make my choices according to any binary. And of course, as a woman in a misogynist culture, and as a person who feels enlivened by femme expression in all its forms - my own, and these frilly flowers luring the bees with their color and scent - there’s an implicit tension here, a balancing act, between liberated expression and safety. Desire is a force of nature, but in a world that feeds on control, being the object of desire can be dangerous. That image in the Thoth deck of a woman riding a golden lion, or perhaps it is a monster, in her full power, was a lighthouse in my teens and early 20s, showing me the possibility of embracing my own sexuality and sensuality without apology. Here at the beginning of my 40s, I feel like I am only just beginning to find the shores she was signaling. 

Writing this essay has been a reawakening of my own creativity. This feels like the beginning of something bigger and deeper than a single essay. An exploration of love and lust and desire as a force feels like a project I am willing to devote myself to, and that is both exciting and somewhat overwhelming - writing a book doesn’t come without at least a few existential crises. But this feels worth the effort. 

As this project, whatever it becomes, takes shape, it feels important to share my thinking in some way, especially on a topic that so clearly centers relationships. I will share my writing here on Substack, and I do plan on continuing to share it all freely, with no paywall to be able to access it. That might change, but for now, it feels good to take down paywalls where and how I can. However, only people who choose to subscribe will be able to comment on these pieces, and I will answer any questions there. If you would like to be in a conversation with me about these ideas as I am working on them, then please become a monthly subscriber to this Substack. 

Thank you for reading this rather long essay, and thank you to those who engaged with it behind the scenes before it was published. 

Soraya Arjan Odishoo

Patty Townsend

Claudia Skinner Brown

Joshua Friedman

Audrey Holst

Connie Clarke

And the Luminous 2024 cohort

Sources cited: 

Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Book of Tarot, by Rachel Pollack. First published in 1980 by Uitgeverij W. N. Schors, Amsterdam

The Tarot Handbook: Practical Applications of Ancient Visual Symbols, by Angeles Arrien, published in 1997 by Jeremy P. Tarcher / Putnam

Red Tarot: A Decolonial Guide to Divinatory Literacy, by Christopher Marmolejo, published in 2024 by North Atlantic Books

Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, by adrienne maree brown, published in 2019 by AK Press

The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, by Audre Lorde, Paper delivered at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Mount Holyoke College, August 25, 1978. Published as a pamphlet by Out & Out Books (available from The Crossing Press). Reprinted in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, Crossing Press:1984