Lust

 "Mitigate Energy with Love; but let Love devour all things".

Aleister Crowley

This is a beautiful and powerful card. In most tarot decks it is called Strength and it portrays a nice and delicate girl with her hands on a lion's jaws (here an example). It looks like she is closing them. The lion embodies our instincts, while the girl our higher feelings that can be cultivated once we manage to control our instincts. However, the presence of the lion underlines the fact that our instincts are a fundamental source of energy too and are connected with desire. That is why, Crowley, in his deck, opted for the alternative name "Lust", because he intended to focus on desire and not just on our possibility to keep it under control. In this card, we do not have a girl or maiden, as she is sometimes called, but a woman who is naked and is straddling not just a lion but a fantastic creature with seven heads and holding a sacred cup of red life-giving substance, reminiscent of the Holy Grail. I will return to this card as well. Crowley used to refer to this woman as the Scarlet Woman.