Strength

The eighth house of the zodiac is about sex and death and all manner of merging. This eighth card of the Major Arcana is about what continues.  See how our goddess is crowned with the eternity symbol?  She ain't scared of the lion snapping her head off.  For she is the alpha and the omega.  Or...she is the alpha and the lion is the omega?  They are opposites that complete each other.  She would be really super boring, all shiney white and gliding through the Serengeti, without making us wonder how she got Mr. lion to go all gushy just because she knows where to scratch.  And the lion growling ferociously is so... Metro Goldwyn Meyer.  But a lion rendered of his fierceness, forgetting his primary purpose of pouncing and shredding and generally inspiring dread - now that's scarey! 

How does she stay so clean? Her only adornment - what?- garlands of roses, and some springy ferns growing from her head. Tender and untrammeled.  If you look at that garland hanging from her waist...it seems to circle her womanly parts - kinda like a chastity belt.  (Stay with me here!)  And the white...she's the quintessential virgin.  Yet that fecundity, all bottled up, imbues her with an assurance as to just how sexy she is.  She will make a man into a beast, the beast into a puppy dog!  (All kinds of politically incorrect...!)

The beast and the woman are two parts of a whole.  The beast is quite capable of killing her with one swipe.  But who would twirl his curly little mane?  She is all service and compassion in her nurse's whites. Which is why she needs the surge of adrenaline that the knowledge she is toying with death affords. Why nurses need E.R's.  Birth, death, general chaos, 12 hour shifts, a little sleep, lots of coffee, come back and do it again.


I can't resist:

TIGER, tiger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

                                                                William Blake

 We know which hand and which eye!