Strength and The Devil

The deck's clearest statement about appetite. The Devil is the thing that has you: compulsion, dependency, the arrangement you are staying inside. Strength is a woman closing a lion's jaws with her hands and no force at all. Together the tradition reads them as mastery of something that is not going to be defeated, only held.

A relationship with a genuine pull and a genuine cost. The pair does not say leave, and it does not say stay. It says the appetite is real and pretending otherwise is the failure mode.

Work you are compelled by rather than choosing. Associated with people whose ambition is closer to a need than they admit.

Strength does not kill the lion. The pairing is explicit that the answer here is patience and containment rather than force or renunciation.