In this guide

Pamela Colman Smith knew folklore before she knew cards. Before she illustrated the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot in 1909, she had designed stage sets for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and absorbed the Celtic Revival’s appetite for myth. So when she placed a woman calmly closing the jaws of a lion on the Strength card, she was not inventing. She was retrieving.

Comparing animal symbolism in tarot and mythology shows that the creatures on the cards are not decorative. They are direct borrowings from mythic traditions that predate the tarot by millennia: the lion from the Nemean ordeal of Heracles, the dog from the gates of Hecate’s underworld, the scorpion from the threshold of the Egyptian Duat.

Definition: What Drives the Overlap Between Tarot Animals and Mythological Beasts?

Definition What Drives the Overlap Between Tarot Animals and Mythological Beasts

The animals in tarot serve the same function they served in ancient myth: they embody forces that human language cannot easily name. A lion is not a lion. It is controlled power, royal courage, the risk of being consumed by what you master. A wolf is not a wolf. It is instinct, the wild that lives at the edge of the village, the thing that howls when the moon is dark. The tarot inherited these ready-made symbols from a stream that runs through Greek, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Celtic myth. Every card that shows an animal hides a myth behind the ink.

History and Origins: Where the Animals Came From

History and Origins Where the Animals Came From

The earliest surviving tarot decks, the Visconti-Sforza cards from mid-15th-century Milan, already used animals as emblems of virtue. The Fortitude card (later Strength) showed a woman breaking a pillar or wrestling a lion. That lion came from medieval bestiaries, which themselves copied from classical sources: Pliny the Elder, Aesop, the Physiologus. The lion represented the virtue of fortitudo, courage, because the bestiary said a lion never retreats and sleeps with its eyes open.

By the time the Marseilles tarot standardized in the 1700s, the animals were fixed: the lion on Strength, the two dogs on The Moon, the bird on The Fool, the bull and lion on the Wheel of Fortune. But they were symbols without a story. The mythological context had been flattened into allegory.

The Rider-Waite-Smith deck restored the story. Arthur Edward Waite, a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, instructed Smith to draw cards that reconnected the images to their esoteric roots. The Golden Dawn had studied Egyptian, Greek, and Hebrew myth. They knew that the lion was the sign of Leo, ruled by the Sun, associated with the Egyptian Sekhmet. They knew that the dog was the animal of Hecate, the Greek goddess of crossroads and ghosts. So the deck became a visual encyclopedia of comparative mythology.

Key Animal Comparisons: What Each Creature Carries from Myth into Tarot

The Lion: Heracles, Sekhmet, and the Strength Card

The lion on the Strength card (Trump VIII in the Waite system, Trump XI in Marseilles) owes its pose to the seventh labor of Heracles: the Nemean lion whose hide could not be pierced by weapons. Heracles strangled it with his bare hands. The card shows a woman, often identified as a representation of the divine feminine or the alchemist’s anima, gently closing the lion’s jaws. She does not fight it. She tames it.

In Egyptian myth, the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet embodied the destructive aspect of the sun. She was both plague and healer. The Strength card holds the same duality: the lion is raw power, the woman is control. A reading that pulls Strength asks whether you are mastering your impulses or being mastered by them. That question is Heracles’ labor.

The Dog and the Wolf: Hecate, Anubis, and the Moon Card

The Moon card (Trump XVIII) shows a dog and a wolf howling at a moon, with a crustacean climbing from a pool. The dog is domestic, the wolf is wild. In Greek myth, Hecate was accompanied by hounds that bayed at the moon and guarded the entrances to the underworld. The wolf was sacred to the Roman god Mars and to the Norse Fenrir, but in the Moon card the wolf represents the untamed psyche, the part that does not obey.

In Egyptian myth, Anubis, the jackal-headed god, guided souls through the darkness of the Duat. The dog and wolf on the Moon card perform the same function: they stand at the threshold between the conscious and the unconscious. When we see them in a reading, we are being asked to move through a liminal space, to trust what we cannot see.

The Scorpion: Selket, the Death Card, and the Threshold

The Death card (Trump XIII) rarely shows a scorpion directly, but the image of the scorpion is embedded in the card’s deeper meaning. In the Thoth deck, Aleister Crowley placed a scorpion in the Death card alongside a serpent and an eagle, representing the three stages of transformation. In Egyptian myth, the goddess Selket (Serqet) was a scorpion-protector of the dead. Her scorpion guarded the canopic jars and stung the enemies of the soul.

The scorpion in myth is the creature that kills and protects in the same gesture. The Death card is never literal death. It is the necessary sting that ends one form so another can emerge. That is precisely what Selket did for the Egyptian dead: she guarded the passage.

The Bird: The Fool’s Companion and the Soul

The Fool card (Trump 0) shows a small white dog, but earlier decks placed a bird beside him. In the Visconti-Sforza deck, the Fool holds a feather or is followed by a bird. Birds in mythology are almost always psychopomps: the Greek psyche was depicted as a butterfly or a bird, and the Egyptian ba was a human-headed bird that left the body at death. The Fool is the soul setting out on its journey, untethered by the body.

The bird is not decoration. It is the spirit of the Fool, already airborne.

Practices: How We Use Mythological Animal Symbolism in Readings

When we read tarot, we do not need to memorize every myth. But we find that knowing the myth changes how we see the card.

Take the Chariot (Trump VII). The card usually shows a warrior in a chariot pulled by two sphinxes, one black and one white. In Greek myth, the sphinx was the riddling creature that terrorized Thebes. Oedipus solved her riddle and she destroyed herself. The charioteer is Oedipus after the victory: he has integrated the two poles of existence by answering the riddle of his own nature. In a reading, the Chariot asks what riddle the querent is avoiding.

We keep one concrete practice at our table: when a card with a prominent animal appears, we name the animal aloud and ask what it was in the old stories. The lion is Heracles. The dog is Hecate. The scorpion is Selket. The snake on the Magician’s belt is the Ouroboros, the Egyptian serpent that eats its own tail to represent cyclic time. Saying the name pulls the myth into the room.

Common Misconceptions: What the Animal Symbols Are Not

The first misconception is that animal symbolism is universal. It is not. The serpent in the Devil card is a Christian symbol of temptation, but the same serpent on the Magician’s belt is a Gnostic and Egyptian symbol of wisdom. Context determines meaning. A tarot reader who calls every snake “evil” misses half the tradition.

The second misconception is that the animals are arbitrary. They are not. The Fool’s dog is not a random pet. In the Greco-Roman cult of the Cynics, the dog (Greek kyon) was the model of a philosopher who lived without shame, loyal to truth alone. The Fool is the divine fool, the one who has left social convention behind. The dog at his heels is not companionship. It is a philosophical statement.

The third misconception is that the Thoth deck and the Rider-Waite-Smith deck use the same animals. They do not. Crowley’s Thoth deck replaces the lion on Strength with a woman riding a beast (often called the Lust card) and adds a serpent and a scorpion in the Death card. The animals were re-coded to fit an alchemical and Thelemic framework. Comparing the two decks is itself a lesson in how symbols shift across traditions.

Notable Figures and Texts

Two figures shaped the animal symbolism of modern tarot. Arthur Edward Waite (1857–1942) wrote The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), where he explained the mythological sources of each card. Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) wrote The Book of Thoth (1944), where he replaced many traditional animals with astrological and alchemical hybrids. Both men drew heavily on the work of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, whose secret Book T (attributed to Mathers and Westcott) had already mapped the cards to the zodiac and the planets, fixing the animals to specific constellations: the lion to Leo, the scorpion to Scorpio, the fish to Pisces.

The primary ancient source for the animal myths is Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which collects stories of humans transformed into animals. Tarot shares Ovid’s assumption: that creatures carry the memory of human experience.

FAQ

Why is the lion a symbol of strength in tarot? The lion appears in the Strength card because medieval bestiaries and Greek myth presented it as the animal that cannot be subdued by force. Heracles’ wrestling of the Nemean lion became the archetype of mastering brute power with intelligence and will.

What animal in tarot is most often misinterpreted? The dog on the Fool card. Many readers assume it represents a loyal companion, but in myth the dog belongs to Hecate and the Cynic philosophers. It signals a state of being untethered from society, not friendship.

How does mythology help interpret the Moon card? The Moon card’s dog and wolf are the sacred animals of Hecate, the goddess of crossroads and the underworld. They mark the card as a journey through the dark, a necessary passage before dawn. Knowing Hecate’s myth clarifies that the card is not about fear but about transition.

Do all tarot decks use the same animal symbolism? No. The Rider-Waite-Smith deck and the Thoth deck differ significantly. The Thoth deck replaces the lion with a multi-beast hybrid, and the Moon card shows no dog or wolf but a scarab beetle. Readers should check the deck’s guide for its mythological framework.

Closing

The animals on the cards are not mute. They speak in the language of the old stories, and the stories are always the same: the passage through danger, the taming of instinct, the loyalty of the soul to its path. Understanding the myth behind the image does not make the reading easier. It makes it deeper.

For more on how symbols travel across traditions, see our tarot symbolism guide. If you want to trace a specific animal through multiple decks, the glossary of mythological creatures collects the key figures. And for a full breakdown of how the Major Arcana maps to classical myth, read our guide to the Major Arcana and mythology.