Learning to Read the Empress
This series on the major arcana presents some ways that I like to think about each of the majors with the hope that it helps you learn more about or think differently about these cards. In each of these posts, I provide an overview of how I read the relevant major arcanum through a few different lenses: with keywords; in the context of other majors; and through visuals. You can read more about the premise behind this structure in the introductory post on the “Learning to Read the Major Arcana” series.
These may represent just a small sample of what I might consider when I see a major arcanum, but they are still quite deep takes, so they can be a lot to take in all at once. Don’t be afraid to skip around and come back to it paragraph by paragraph as needed.
Keywords
As a reminder, these keywords are examples and not exhaustive of all possible meanings of the Empress. Remember to take what works for you and question what doesn’t. I’ve tried to arrange these keywords by broad concept to help organize them and make them easier to learn.
Nature, Farming, Organic development, Chaos
Creation, Production
Creativity, Art, Beauty, Harmony, Luxury
Pregnancy, Motherhood, Nurturing, Reception, Material feminine
Love, Lovers/Wives
Venus, Earth
In Context
As with the previous posts in this series, it makes the most sense to continue this Fool’s Journey into understanding the major arcana by looking behind to the High Priestess and ahead to the Emperor. In that combination, we can see the divine feminine coming down into the material realm, but it’s just the start.
By this I mean that the Empress is a “real woman.” Unlike the High Priestess, the Empress embodies her material self: the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly. It’s all her. She’s all there, and you may find all of creation in some depictions of her. The High Priestess may be a woman, but her spiritual and potentially cloistered existence allows her to distance herself from her body, representing the divine feminine in contrast to the material feminine. The Empress has no such luxury because she isn’t a religious leader focused on the spiritual needs of her flock. She, like her consort, is responsible for others and their everyday needs, so her powers and associations stem from her connection to the earth. Caring for her community through the earth ties her to nature and agriculture, gathering and receiving the bounty of the earth. Because of her physical femininity and need to carry on the royal lineage, the Empress is also tied to pregnancy and motherhood, unlike the High Priestess who could very well remain a virgin.
The Empress and Emperor are gendered complementary titles suggesting two halves of the material realm. They work in tandem to create a whole together. Through this there are clear distinctions between the two in everyday gendered terms: woman and man, mother and father, husband and wife. In contemporary times, we know that not all gender identities or sexual and romantic relationships fit into that narrow binary, but that doesn’t mean that the Empress can’t fill those roles or those archetypal functions. If the idea of gender binaries and their stereotypes (e.g., a woman’s receptivity and creativity yet also passivity) bother you, you may find the concepts of yin and yang to be more useful since that “binary” allows for a mix of the twin energies within each person. There is much to appreciate about that system, and learning it will shed new light on the Empress and Emperor as potential embodiments of those energies.
Beyond that, however, it’s fun to see the Emperor and all of his control in contrast to the wild nature of the Empress, who refuses to be tamed. She is Mother Nature, full of beauty and chaos, and the Emperor’s walled gardens can never fully compare to her richness.
Shifting from the Empress’s neighbors to her relatives, we look to the Hanged Man (12) and the World/Universe (21) as other instances of 3 in single-digit numerology. The threes are often tied to expression and creation, the expansion of the two. In contrast to that expansion and expression, the Hanged Man as a card of stasis seems out of joint, and the World is often the completed work, after the expansion is done. Putting the three in conversation, the Hanged Man becomes a moment of gestation—pausing and ripening and enduring some pain—and the World is completion or a new birth, so the Empress is the initial spark, or more aptly for an earth mother archetype, the fertile ground in which new things can be planted (ideas as well as children). Often, the Empress is depicted as pregnant, and she might signal the time before the pain of the Hanged Man or the actual birthing of the World has completed. All are necessary stages.
You might also want to consider which 3 she is not, Death or the Unnamed One (13). This helps reinforce the idea of the Empress as a source of life and creation, even of beginnings, rather than of endings.
Now we’ll look at the astrological and elemental correspondences, which are based on the Empress’s association with Venus: Taurus (the Hierophant) and Libra (Justice / Adjustment) as the signs ruled by Venus and the other earth signs and planet represented by the Hermit (Virgo), and the Devil (Capricorn), as well as the World/Universe (Earth / Saturn), which we’ve already discussed.
The Hierophant and Justice seem strange choices for the Empress to rule over (by astrological properties), but both archetypes involve persuasive powers and harmonious connections between people and between concepts and lived experiences, all of which is squarely within the Empress’s wheelhouse.
The Hierophant requires an audience that believes in his power; his flock must trust him or there’s no point. This reinforces the Empress’s power to attract, but it also reminds us of the nurturing required to maintain that audience and grow that community. Even though the Hierophant functions in a spiritual setting, he is connected to the everyday lives of the people who try to bring his teachings into daily life practice. He is a conduit between the spiritual realm and the material realm, and the Empress is the energy that allows for the harmonious connection. (He also likes his jewels and ceremonial garments, much like the Empress.)
Similarly, Justice requires trust in the process and faith that the institutions of social control are working in everyone’s best interests. She may seem to give zero fucks with her cold logic, but that is a façade (reinforcing the Empress’s associations with surfaces) because Justice is tied to social institutions, just as the Hierophant is. Together they’re both archetypes of hegemony (social control that’s “given freely” and often without realization), and that requires persuasion and a kind of communal seduction. If we no longer accept them, there is little that they can do to get us back other than ostracize us from normal society. I’m getting into the weeds of cultural studies theory here, but trust me that the Hierophant and Justice are appropriately Venusian and within the realm of the Empress.
Adjustment is slightly different in that it’s about the natural balancing of things, and there’s a harmony that’s beautiful in its precision, but it’s more truly cold. That said, Adjustment is also tied to music, so we get some of the Empress’s creativity and expression back into the mix.
The Hermit and the Devil may feel like more of a stretch because the Hermit seems so Mercurial and the Devil feels so antithetical to growth. But the two offer a contrast in materialism. The Hermit is very spiritual and seems mostly devoid of material needs: hermits are traditionally without possessions, just living off the land or someone else’s resources. The Devil is all about the material realm, whether that’s sex or money or power over others. The two create two ends of a spectrum on which the Empress sits, comfortably in the middle. She has wealth and power and sexuality, like the Devil, but she may not grip it as tightly, and it isn’t all of her. The Empress makes room for new life and new growth, as seen in the World, and that requires letting go. Of course, some instances of the Empress just seem like a rose-scented Devil, who is sometimes depicted as a female-bodied temptress. The temptress is certainly part of the Empress’s allure, but it’s better to not pigeon-hole her.
Looking for these kinds of distinctions between similar cards (and it would be easy to bring in others) often raises more questions than it answers, but it can open up new ways of thinking about the Empress. Those who want to go further with comparisons may want to consider the Lovers since the Empress is sometimes one half of that pair, as well as the other strong women of the majors: Strength or Lust/La Force and the Star in particular.
Visuals
For interpreting the visuals, I chose one of my favorite images of the Empress, the one in Siolo Thompson’s Linestrider Tarot. (You can read my interview with that deck here.)
There’s a decent chance that the first thing you noticed in this card was the Empress’s exposed breast. The Empress’s breast is both a source of maternal nourishment and sexual desire; she both is mother and lover (hopefully not to the same person). Is the Empress closing her robe after feeding her child or opening it up to expose more? Is her distant look, away from the viewer, detachment from a perfunctory experience or some coquettish (or cold) charm designed to attract? She appears in control of her body and its revealing. And she wears a jeweled crown even in the wild setting of a forest; artifice and art blended with natural wilderness. But unlike a typical crown, the jewels appear like stars, reminding me of the Virgin Mary and the paradox of the feminine binary (she was both a mother and a virgin). But the stars also suggest that she is the earth, and the heavens float above her.
The wild animals that look up to the Empress—a monkey and a tiger—offer more multilayered meanings. They are wild animals, not domesticated pets, but the Empress has a special association with Nature and natural things. She does not fear them. Indeed, she attracts them to her as she attracts anything else she wants. They also represent her as an archetype. The monkey is clever and resourceful, and the tiger is beautiful but wise and deadly, especially as it guards its territory. These qualities represent various facets of the Empress: a beautiful surface with great depths, protective but with a penchant for danger and manipulation. She is like Mother Nature, beautiful and nurturing but also wild and dangerous. She is everything.
The curling tiger’s tail wraps around the Empress, and it emerges from behind her as if she were the tiger. She is graceful and luxurious, but she is also incredibly strong and resilient. In this form, there’s also a bit of detachment from humanity, as if she operates by slightly different rules than the other human archetypes. The Empress can be seen as selfish, or at least self-centered, when not overtly focused on rearing or seducing another person (the archetypal conundrum of the Mother/Whore binary). But here it seems as if she is just working through a different framework, one that wasn’t approved by the powers-that-be. She is ready to bring a touch of chaos to the Emperor’s orderly world.
Did you learn something?
If so, you may love my self-paced intensive fundamentals course for new and experienced tarot readers, Read Tarot like a Nerd. And check out my current and upcoming semester of courses for tarot readers who want to move beyond the basics.