A Year of Strength, Hope, and Devotion
Personal reflections on my Strength year and what Strength may hold for 2024, plus a primer on how to calculate year cards
If you’re unfamiliar with how to calculate your personal and collective year cards, scroll down to the bottom, where I’ve included a little primer.
As I conclude my personal Strength year and we turn collectively to a universal Strength year in 2024 (2 + 0 + 2 + 4 = 8, Strength), I find myself thinking once again about devotion. Last week, I had the pleasure of participating in a cozy book club discussion of my book, Radical Tarot, hosted by Nick Kepley and Angie Miller of the In Search of Tarot podcast. (Listen to their 3-episode discussion of the book on the podcast.) In our conversation, the topic of the 8s came up, and I shared that I’ve recently started associating the tarot’s 8s with devotion, a correlation that quite honestly took me by surprise even as it left my mouth. Looking back on my year, however, I can see all the threads coming together, all the beads slipped onto the rosary string. I can see it in my practices, in my attitude, and in my writing. As so often happens, I knew that Strength was devotion before I knew it. (It’s funny, how we think the conscious mind is the intelligent one, when so often it’s jogging to catch up to what the body, the heart, the spirit already knows.)
There were some things I expected from my Strength year. I expected it would involve facing parts of me I didn’t like, facing things I’m afraid of, and generally being challenged to approach difficult topics and events with courage, compassion, and love. Strength, after all, requires us to be strong. I often joked that my Strength year would be when I finally adopted a dog again. (See my Strength card from Fifth Spirit Tarot, above.) And although I honestly didn’t think it would happen—my heart is still raw from having to re-home my last dog when we moved to Portland six years ago—in August my partner and I brought home our precious one-eyed rescue pug, Apollo. (I’m just realizing, as I’m typing this, that my friend texted me his rescue listing on August 8th, the 8th day of the 8th month of my 8 year.)
All of those things I expected did come to pass. I faced some personal things this year that would have collapsed me into a trembling heap on the floor three years ago, and met them with an amount of courage and grace that surprised me. I acknowledged unflattering parts of myself and instead of descending into shame or denial, I forgave those parts, forgave myself. Instead of hiding from controversy, I did what integrity demanded of me and spoke up. From the river to the sea. I opened my heart to more love, even though it hurt. adrienne maree brown wrote that a “broken heart can cover more territory,” and it’s true.1
What surprised me about all of this was that none of it was hard. Or rather, it was hard, was devastating, humbling, destabilizing, scary. But the choice to face those hard things was not. The choice to face them was easy. Not as in fun or enjoyable, but as in simple, clear, obvious. The way that choosing to face any hard thing is easy when it is motivated by love.
bell hooks says it best:
“To live our lives based on the principles of a love ethic (showing care, respect, knowledge, integrity, and the will to cooperate), we have to be courageous. Learning how to face our fears is one way we embrace love. Our fear may not go away, but it will not stand in the way.”2
That’s something I never understood about Strength before, not fully. That though we are afraid, the courage comes easy. Though there are consequences, the choice is not agonizing. Though we may get hurt, running away is unthinkable. When we face fear as an act of love, the fear has no power over us.
The French root of “courage” is, of course, cœur. Heart.
But the most surprising part of my year, the thing I truly did not expect, was the devotion.
In January, the very beginning of my Strength year, I found a fountain of Our Lady of Guadalupe at a thrift store. The fountain had been there for at least six months—I’d admired her before—but this time I was irrevocably drawn to her. I showed her to Aaron, and he loved her too, so we took her home, cleaned her, and got her fountain motor running. Then I spontaneously began a devotional practice with Mary as a face of Inanna-Ishtar-Astarte-Aphrodite-Venus.3 I had already been researching and working with the Queen of Heaven, as all these goddesses were called, but the devotion didn’t begin until Mary entered the picture. And it terrified me to work with her. My religious trauma from growing up in the church would previously have prevented me from even considering working with Mary, but there I was, burning rose incense, reciting the Orphic Hymn to Aphrodite, reading her Sappho.
The subject of my next book—Queer Devotion—came to me in April, after teaching a class on the subject. The chapter I wrote for the book proposal was called “Birth of Transgender Venus,” a retelling of one of Venus-Aphrodite’s origin myths as a sacred trans femme narrative. (The book is slated for publication with Hay House in May 2025.) Then, during Venus retrograde this summer, I took up another practice that terrified me: praying the rosary. I modified the prayers and queered them up until they felt right, an act that felt sacred and sacrilegious at the same time, both scary and thrilling.
Finally, while praying one day in August (the 8th month of my 8 year), I had a realization about the Strength card as Mary. I wrote about it on Instagram:
A few days ago during my devotion I had a revelation about the person in the Strength card as Mary. The Strength person is wrapped in a garland of roses—Mary’s sacred flower & the origin of the rosary—that entwine her with the lion, the wild beast: her child. This is Mary as the Mother of All, of god and life and earth and stars. The Mother of Beasts, as some of those Queens before her were known to be. This is a Creatrix that does not exile her children from a garden and abandon them, but a Creatrix that is always with them because she is part of them. She IS them. And the earth they walk on, the food they eat, the predators that stalk them, and the dark soil to which they all will return.
Read the full Instagram post here.
Of course, I didn’t connect Strength and the 8s to devotion itself until it dropped out of my mouth during that bookclub chat. (What a gift it is to spend a whole year with a card so its lessons have time to sink through our thick human skulls.)
To tease out the connections here a bit, the root of devotion, I think, is love. Why else would a person devote themselves to anything, whether another person, a community, a cause, a craft, a god? Devotion arises from a strength of feeling and conviction so strong that formerly impossible things become possible. Devotion requires willingly putting other needs before your own, not out of compulsion or necessity, but out of choice. Because you want to. Devotion is what keeps the writer up in the small hours of the morning, tap-tapping away at their solitary craft. It’s what leads parents to sacrifice for their children, partners for their partners, friends for their friends, nearly without a thought because a sacrifice becomes a gift when it’s made in love. Devotion—love—is what inspires pilgrimages as well as picket lines, masses as well as marches.
Strength is a card about courage, moral fortitude, resilience, and compassion. What are those but the gifts of devotion? In my Fifth Spirit card, I wrote “Love” and “Trust” on the kneeling person’s knees. What are love and trust but the foundation of devotion? (The person is kneeling, for Gay Christ’s sake!4) Devotion is not motivated by fear, but by desire and love. Devotion is not a transactional, quid pro quo arrangement, but an expression of profound hope. Devotion requires the courage to open oneself to being acted upon by external forces, to being changed, and perhaps to becoming an instrument of change.
But before I get ahead of myself, let’s talk about the number 8.
In numerology, 8 is usually connected to power, ambition, and capital. Card 8 in the Tarot de Marseille system is Justice, which when connected to these meanings illustrates a bleak, but realistic, picture of Justice as an arm of the state, designed to prop up the powerful and protect capital instead of people. The earliest Visconti-Sforza Strength card did not show a gentle lady stroking a lion’s mouth, as shown in the Marseille and Rider-Waite-Smith tarots, but a muscular man in the act of clubbing a lion. In Italian and French decks, the Strength card is named La Forza or La Force, which can translate to strength but also, as it says, to force. Brutish, overpowering, unmerciful force.
Eight is associated with advanced systems, mechanics, and technology (8 = 4 + 4, and 4 is the number of structure, order, and civilization). Here, the shape of the 8 becomes a fan belt, a conveyor belt, the gears of a clockwork device. We can see the connection to technology in Strength’s numerological pair, The Star (17; 1 + 7 = 8). The Star is ruled by Aquarius, sign of futurism, advanced technology, and innovation—an energy we can also sense in the 8 of Wands, aimed at the stratosphere, rockets flaring for infinity and beyond. The symmetry of 8 and its factors (2 + 2 + 2 + 2; 4 + 4) makes 8 a number of perfection, or of perfect-ing. This is the energy of the 8 of Pentacles, laboring away at one’s craft, forever honing and improving, striving for the best.
If we turn the numeral 8 on its side, it’s a lemniscate, the sign for infinity, giving it a quality of self-perpetuation, repetition, and inertia. But the lemniscate is also a closed loop. It can entrap us as surely as the 8 of Swords, where the lemniscate’s infinite cycle becomes the spiral of limiting and self-defeating thoughts. Eight can provide the momentum (8 of Wands) and dedication (8 of Pentacles) to meet obstacles and reach goals, or it can become a trap of ever-repeating circles, spinning and spinning and going nowhere. We can relate the 8s to Isaac Newton’s first law of motion, also known as the Principle of Inertia, which states that a body in motion will stay in motion and a body at rest will remain at rest until acted upon by an external force. The 8 of Cups is the only 8 that shows the interruption of that inertia: in breaking the loop by walking away, in the external force (i.e. strength) of departure, in the courage to do something different.
If we examine the 8s through the lens of devotion, however, things take on a different hue. My friend Rebecca Scolnick points out in her magical numerology book, The Witch’s Book of Numbers, that the word “God” is an 8.5 (Derived by taking each letter’s position in the Pythagorean Alphabet [see chart below], adding, and reducing: 7 + 6 + 4 = 17; 1 + 7 = 8.) What new layers are revealed when we consider the Star (17) and Strength (8) as being in direct relationship with the God(s) of our understanding? What wisdom might the 8 hold about the nature of the divine? How might this illuminate our work with the minor 8s? What might this mean for 2024, our collective 8 year?
The 8s are connected to power, and God or the divine of our understanding is certainly powerful. The divine can be unmerciful. The holy texts and ancient myths are not short on tales of the wrath of goddesses and gods. But God is also, quite literally, divine. God is Sophia, divine wisdom, spiritual enlightenment. God is the creatrix of all life. God is eternity (∞), the beginning and the end. God, as I grew up learning, is love.
Rebecca connects the 8 to Plato’s allegory of the cave and the continual, looping path of learning and unlearning that is gnosis, or spiritual knowledge:
“…Gnosis is not a permanent state of being, achieved only once and then maintained. I believe that the journey to enlightenment repeats itself again and again as you learn and unlearn… Our initial journey into the light merely shows us the fact of our ignorance, not its depth. Despite the pain of adjustment inherent in the process, we must continue to peel back the layers of that ignorance, learning as we go how to deal with the pain and knowing that it's worth hanging in and getting through. We know that liberation and seeing the Sun are worth it. Then we go back down into the cave to push through yet again...”6
Strength and the 8s can be seen as guides in this process of learning and unlearning, reminding us of the continual necessity to reflect on ourselves and face our beasts with courage and integrity. Rebecca points out 8’s connection to Venus, planet of love and values, which takes about 8 years to complete its flower-like cycle pattern, and to the 8th house in astrology, which rules themes of sex, death, taboos, the underworld, and external influences and resources (bringing to mind the external force of Newton’s first law once again). These connections further reveal the 8’s meanings of fear-facing and shadow work.
The iconography of Strength and The Star connects them to numerous goddesses. Strength is associated with lion goddesses including Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, and Cybele. The Star reflects star goddesses including Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, Aphrodite, and Venus. The symbol of many of these goddesses was the same: an 8-pointed star, representing the star (planet) of Venus (whose cycle takes 8 years, remember). And though the lion was not one of Venus’s sacred animals, Venus/Aphrodite has frequently been represented in art accompanied by or riding a lion to represent the triumph of love. The Ishtar Gate, decorated with lions, was the 8th gate into the city of Babylon.
(When I began my devotional practice with Mary as a face of these goddesses, I was fully unaware of their connections to the 8s. You can’t make this shit up.)
Another thing many of these goddesses have in common is that they are goddesses of both love and war. Illuminating, perhaps, the dual sides of the 8’s twisted ouroboros: power-with versus power-over, strength versus force, labor versus exploitation, fluidity versus compulsion, the merciful and punishing faces of Divine. Love has driven many to violence, after all, and many wars are waged in devotion’s name.7
So what does this mean for 2024?
Devotion in itself is not good or holy—that depends on what you’re devoted to. We must not forget that devotion bends easily into zealotry and persecution of those who are different. These are themes we are already seeing on the global stage, themes we have been seeing in legislation against gender-affirming healthcare, drag bans, and anti-LGBTQ censorship for years, for example. And these are themes we can expect to see even more of, even more clearly, and with more power behind them in 2024. The 8 year holds the potential to recycle and intensify the same old capitalist colonialist white supremacist violence, to codify it even more firmly into law (8 as Justice), and for fascist movements operating under the false banner of “God” to rise to power. But 2024 also holds profound potential for the rest of us to come together in solidarity. From the genocides and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, Sudan, Congo, and elsewhere, to the dreaded 2024 presidential election in the U.S., we as a collective are challenged this year to show up in solidarity and in strength. It is up to us and our devotion to one another to stand strongly against that power, to meet it with our own.
In Radical Tarot, I write about Strength as radical connection and enmeshment:
One radical application of Strength is to reconsider our very conception of nature, our relationship to it, and our relationality within it; to consider that nature may not be a top-down thing, not a hierarchical taxonomy with humankind at the zenith, but something interwoven, indefinable, and complex. If lions are the king of beasts, what of the bacteria that live in the lion’s gut? What of the fleas and ticks that snack on its blood? We’ve all heard of the web of life, but philosopher and professor Timothy Morton suggests conceptualizing nature as a mesh: “a nontotalizable, open-ended concatenation of interrelations that blur and confound boundaries at practically any level: between species, between the living and the nonliving, between organism and environment.”8 Tarot commentators have noted that in the Marseille pattern, the lion appears to be fused with or emerging from the person’s lower body. In the RWS deck, the person and lion seem to be wrapped in the same flowered garland—entwined, as it were, human with beast with plant with environment. Enmeshed.
Perhaps both ideas are present in Strength: the human propensity to separate, dominate, extract, force; and the human enmeshment with the nonhuman, the more-than-human, the wildness and aliveness of all things. However lofty and removed we think ourselves to be, however hard we scrub the dirt from our houses and from under our nails, however horribly we have mistreated the planet and each other and ourselves, Strength reminds us that we are not separate from nature, from the wild, from stream or spore or stranger.9
This radical enmeshment—us with nature, me with you—is solidarity.
Strength is solidarity as in the lemniscate of the unbreakable chain of linked elbows blocking traffic, blocking bulldozers, picketing the workplace, occupying the statehouse. The 8 is the shape of handcuffs that secure you to the door of a historic building slated for demolition, that chain you to a sacred tree in the path of a pipeline, that arrest you in a voluntary act of civil disobedience. What is solidarity if not a devotion to one another so strong that no pressure from the state, from the media, from censorship, from bosses or family or the status quo, can break it? A devotion so strong that it urges us to act for the love and freedom of one another. A devotion where the rituals and offerings are marches, boycotts, protests, direct action—external forces that break the inertia of capitalist colonialist white supremacy’s perpetual cycle of abuse and exploitation, that shift the repeating path of the 8, that evolve it into something more equitable, liberated, and based in love.
So let’s reconsider the 8s through the lenses of love, devotion, and solidarity.
The 8 of Pentacles teaches us that work, no matter how tedious and difficult, when done out of love is easy. Love, devotion, hope, these are the things that keep us doing the work, day in and day out, even when it’s hard and uncomfortable, even when it costs us. Devoted work is a hopeful act because it believes in the future of its creation.
The 8 of Wands shows the explosive power of having a purpose. Wands, the fire suit, are connected to spirit, the indefinable thread of flame that connects the human soul to the divine. Wands are what get us up in the morning, what animate and motivate us. The 8 of Wands, then, is the power of purpose aligned with spirit, the kind of fiery purpose that drives movements, inspires change, changes hearts.
The 8 of Swords shows the confining force of the 8, trapping us in thought spirals and illusions. Like so many of the Swords, this one shows a cautionary tale: one of assumed helplessness and victimization (the opposite of Strength), or one of deluded devotion to something harmful and unworthy. The 8 of Swords can show up when we’re in denial, averting our eyes from truth, tying our own hands with false narratives, often out of fear of having to change.
The 8 of Cups represents departure, breaking away, moving on, not as acts of desperation but as radical acts of hope. The 8 of Cups invites us to break the cycle of misery, abuse, disappointment, pain, for the hope of finding—creating—something better.
The Star and Strength both model openness, radical acceptance, and courageous vulnerability. Strength has the courage to face fears and meet adversity with resilience and compassion. They confront the beast with open arms. The Star has been through the worst (The Tower) but doesn’t close themself off, doesn’t become bitter and calloused. Instead, they hold themselves open. They pour themselves out. They have hope that they will become full again.
The Star means hope, but hope is not a sure thing. If it was, then there would be no need for hope. Hope carries within it the possibility of disappointment, yet it acts bravely despite it. In Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit writes about hope as the fuel for action:
“I say all this because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say it because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.”10
The same can be said of love. bell hooks wrote, “Love is an action, a participatory emotion.”11 If love does not guide us to act, then love is only a feeling. But when we act on love, when we bring it outside of ourselves into our actions, decisions, and everyday existence, we make love a practice.
And when love is a practice, we call that solidarity.
So this year, let us call on Strength to bolster our courage with love. Let us call on the 8 of Pentacles for capable and diligent work, the 8 of Wands for the purpose of a heart on fire, the 8 of Swords for liberation from lies and illusions, the 8 of Cups for breaking the loop of the status quo. Let us call on The Star for guidance, for healing, and for hope that spurs us to action.
Let 2024 be the year we become devoted to one another. Let this be the year we make love a practice.
Love as a practice is not only solidarity; it’s devotion.
Happy New Year,
Charlie
The More You Know: A Brief Primer on How to Calculate Year Cards
For those unfamiliar with year cards, this is a practice that combines numerology and tarot, pioneered by Mary K. Greer. Using Greer’s method, you add up the year’s digits to find the corresponding Major Arcana card, and that’s the collective year card. So 2024 (2 + 0 + 2 + 4 = 8) is going to be a Strength year.
You can also find your personal year card by adding the month and day of your birth to the current year and reducing. For example, my birthday is February 17th (2/17), so I add 2 + 17 + 2023 = 2042.12 Then I reduce that sum by adding the digits: 2 + 0 + 4 + 2 = 8. If you receive a number between 1 and 22, the corresponding Major Arcana card is your personal year card (with 22 corresponding to The Fool). If you receive a number greater than 22, reduce again by adding the digits until you get a number between 1 and 22. So my personal year card for 2023 has been Strength, and for 2024 it will be the Hermit.
There’s also another, hidden card to take into account with every year: the card’s numerological pair(s). For our Strength (8) year, the pair is The Star (17), because 1 + 7 = 8. We are currently finishing a collective Chariot (7) year (2 + 0 + 2 + 3 = 7), and our hidden factor card has been 16, The Tower, (1 + 6 = 7). (Feels right, no?) Greer calls these numerological card groupings “tarot constellations,” and some groups have three cards instead of two. I’ve listed them all out below to save you the headache.
1s - The Magician (1), The Wheel of Fortune (10), The Sun (19)
2s - The High Priestess (2), Justice (11), Judgment (20)
3s - The Empress (3), The Hanged One (12), The World (21)
4s - The Emperor (4), Death (13), The Fool (0, but 22 for these purposes since it’s the 22nd Major Arcana card)
5s - The Hierophant (5), Temperance (14)
6s - The Lovers (6), The Devil (15)
7s - The Chariot (7), The Tower (16)
8s - Strength (8), The Star (17)
9s - The Hermit (9), The Moon (18)
The personal year card is experienced—you guessed it—personally, playing out in your personal and inner life. That’s most likely going to be the strongest and most immediate energy in your year, since it’s so intimate. The collective year card is like the environment that your personal year card plays out in. To offer a metaphor, your personal year card is like a hill or valley you are traversing, and the collective year card is the climate and weather. Your experience of the year will be shaped by the interaction of both.
adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 109.
bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (New York: William Morrow, 2001), 101.
These goddesses are thought to be syncretic iterations of the same goddess across various cultures and centuries. Mary isn’t usually spoken of as a goddess, and her ties to these earlier goddesses are less researched and codified (probably because the church would hate that), but the evidence is there. A topic for another post. (And a chapter in my next book!)
Gay Christ is a real thing! And a topic for another post.
Rebecca Scolnick, The Witch’s Book of Numbers: Enhance Your Magic with Numerology (San Antonio, TX: Hierophant Publishing, 2022), 147.
Scolnick, 154-5.
I do not mean to condemn all violence as evil or opposed to love. The oppressed have the right to resist their oppressors by any means necessary, and to say anything else only upholds the violent interests of the status quo. Resistance movements are usually motivated by love. Colonizer and capitalist violence is motivated only by power and capital.
Timothy Morton, “Guest Column: Queer Ecology,” PMLA, Vol. 125, No. 2 (March 2010), 275-6.
Charlie Claire Burgess, Radical Tarot: Queer the Cards, Liberate Your Practice, and Create the Future (Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, Inc., 2023), 83-4.
Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, 3rd ed. (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2016), 4.
hooks, 165.
There’s another way of finding your personal year card where you add the individual digits of your birth date to the current year, rather than the whole numbers. Using my birthday (2/17) and the current year (2023), I would add 2 + 1 + 7 + 2 + 0 + 2 + 3 = 17. This would make my personal 2023 year card number 17, The Star. Note that the other method of adding gets me 8, Strength, which is The Star’s numerological pair (1 + 7 = 8). Personally, I always consider the influence of both cards in my year, so while I have strongly felt Strength in my year, I have also felt the presence of The Star. No matter which way you add, you will always find that you receive numbers in the same numerological group. To go deeper, I recommend Mary K. Greer’s book Archetypal Tarot (Weiser 2021).
thank you, i really enjoyed reading this! turns out my personal year for 2024 is also 8.
Very much looking forward to a strength year! My personal card for the coming year is the hermit and I am very excited about that as well!