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XI Strength
Even though I
painted this card a long time ago it still surprises me with
many new elements and revelations. These things make me think
that my original intention in this painting, which was to
portray inner, feminine strength is merely the tip of the
iceberg.
I look at it now
and see the sphinx of Greek mythology. The sphinx was a
creature made up of the body of a lion, the breast and head of a
woman, and the talons of an eagle, with some variation depending
on the source.
The myth goes that the sphinx perched herself atop a rock on a
road near Thebes and posed a riddle, given to her by the muses,
to anyone who passed.
"What is that which has one voice and yet becomes four-footed
and two-footed and three-footed?" She asked. The sphinx then
destroyed anyone who answered incorrectly.
Oedipus found out about this after many people had already
perished and went to meet the sphinx. “Man, who crawls on all
fours as a baby, walks on 2 legs as a man, and 3 legs with the
addition of a cane in old age.” He answered correctly.
Mortified that he knew the answer, the sphinx threw herself off
a cliff to her death. As a prize Oedipus was made King and
unknowingly married his own mother who was widowed when he
unknowingly killed his father.
Some say Oedipus knew the answer because the muses had given it
to him in a dream, others that an oracle gave him the answer and
even others say it was his bloodline to the throne which made
him capable of answering.
Oedipus, it should be noted, means ‘swollen foot’ because his
adoptive parents found him hung by the feet or foot from a
tree. He was hung there by a herdsman who had taken pity on the
child after he was ordered to kill him by the King. The King
had been told by an oracle that Oedipus was destined to kill
him, which he eventually did, irregardless of the Kings attempt
at thwarting it. Is there relation here to XII The Hanged Man,
the next card in the order of Major Arcana?
The sphinx,
including Egyptian and Greek, modern and otherwise, has come to
represent a great mystery. They guard doorways to mysterious
places outside and inside our own selves. In attempting to
answer their riddles we risk death. The questions force our
minds and hearts to fragment and look at words and images in new
ways to find a simple, truthful, and sometimes obvious answer.
It seems to me
that answering correctly risks death as well, as the answer is
transforming and grants you passage to a new place, a birth,
while the lion devours the old.
I believe there
is nothing truly hidden from our souls and the muses inspire us
through major passages with questions that force us to know
ourselves. Don’t know yourself or be deceitful and fail to
progress, the death of stagnation.
The lion’s head,
while not usually part of a Sphinx, is here and is positioned
between the woman’s legs. This is something I didn’t even
realize until recently someone asked me mischievously, “Is that
her kitty” (replace the word kitty with a more colorful word
starting with ‘p’). All I could say is, “why yes, it is!” And
it is. It is the strength and wisdom lying at the doorway to a
woman’s womb and all the symbolic meaning that goes with it.
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