2024 is a Strength year: 2+0+2+4=8.
HUNGER is a theme I see strongly in Strength: when I pull this card, I am very aware of myself as someone with an appetite, and it’s often asking me to examine all the ways I curb that appetite.
I’m not talking about physical appetite, although our relationship with food and the way we feed our bodies is certainly analogous to the way we serve our other hungers. I’m talking about less literal appetites, which will be specific to us all, but can largely be summarized as our appetite for LIFE, and our hunger to know ourselves as alive, to feel joy, to create, to experience pleasure.
Strength corresponds to Leo, which rules the 5th house of pleasure, fun, creativity, and sex. I don’t know about you, but I don’t give myself enough of ANY of those things. Because what if I allow myself more, and I start to like it too much: then what? I’d have to change something, I’d have to figure out how to make more room for these things, to give the hunger more. Maybe it’s better to just not stimulate that appetite.
It can be shameful to be hungry. Think of all the ways our culture depicts women, in particular, with big appetites. You’re a slob, you’re a whore, you’re entitled, you’re selfish. Whatever. It’s never celebrated, that’s for sure. We internalize all of that, and we try to placate our appetite with crumbs when it’s always wanted a feast.
I often think of the lion in Strength as that appetite, and the figure in the white dress is finally willing to ask: what exactly are you hungry for? How much do you need? We’re not in the Chariot anymore, where things are more tightly controlled. Strength asks us to “let ourselves go”—a phrase just dripping with shame. Shaming hunger. But Strength is a reclamation of that phrase: we let ourselves go, yes: we let ourselves go FREE. We let the beast of our appetite out of its cage, understanding, at last, that it won’t devour us…that is, not if we feed it. But to repress that appetite, that is to be devoured—from within, slowly, year after resentful year.
Perhaps this is a year to honor your hunger, to shift from shaming it to celebrating it. It wants more for you.*
Prompts around appetite to help you begin exploring this theme:
The feast I desire
The crumbs I’ve settled for
*
The hunger I’ve resisted feeding
The fear behind the resistance
*Justice was card 8 in older, Marsielles style decks, and Strength was card 11. Arthur Waite, in the creation of the RWS deck, made the swap (presumably for the astrological correspondences, though he was rather coy about it) and honestly, I prefer the story of the Major Arcana with Strength as 8. But plenty of decks have kept those traditional positions, which would make 2024 a Justice year. In a future post, I’ll talk about this swap and also offer a lens on Justice as a potential theme of the year.
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