The Empress upright
The Empress is the card of life expressing itself: love, sensuality, fertility and creation. She says you approach this period through feeling and pleasure rather than analysis. What you live goes through emotion, and when lived well, it can bring you real satisfaction and an understanding won through the heart.
You look to love and to attract, to be in relationship with others, with a taste for social life. You may live for the pleasure of the senses and be at ease in your femininity. You look after what grows and develops, and you help different elements form a harmonious whole.
You may bring a creation to term: an idea, a project, a product, or a child.
She also indicates that you may have a taste for nature, gardening, cooking, beautifying your surroundings, the culture around you, and beautiful things. You may put your social talents to use by hosting, leading or facilitating exchanges. If you have authority, you assert it by encouraging harmony, exchange and physical well-being, and you expect your place to be respected.
Your strengths
You have imagination, the ability to combine what you have lived through to create something new. You live your passions fully, and what you feel gives you access to a deep understanding of life.
What holds you back
- You may show superficial knowledge and strike a pose.
- You seek pleasure without limits when restraint is called for.
- When analysis is called for, you stick with your emotional approach and refuse to look at the facts.
- You can live your mother's passions and sensuality instead of your own.
What helps
Accepting your body and the natural world rather than denying them. Fixing your attention on what you want to build rather than on misery, lack or weakness: your imagination builds what you concentrate on. Adding reflection to your emotions when the situation calls for analysis.
Family
You are marked by your mother and by the way she mothered. The card evokes the mother, the sister and the wife.
The Empress reversed
The Empress is the card of the mother, of femininity and of creative force. Reversed, she speaks of how you live your femininity, your role as a mother or caregiver, and your creativity.
She can say you are not behaving in a feminine way in the usual sense. This sometimes comes from your mother: you may not want to resemble her, or you may resist her because she was not very available emotionally. You may also be breaking away from the habits of care passed down in your family. You then wonder how to be feminine without meeting everyone's needs and expectations.
You may deliberately reject traditional feminine roles, or decide not to have children. You may feel unrecognized, powerless or put down because of your gender or your feminine traits. You may also feel that others do not see you as you are, or hide your true personality behind conventional feminine attributes.
The reversed card can show the mother as she appears in her excesses: a smothering, intrusive, demanding or absent mother. If you project the Empress onto another woman, you may see her as an ideal woman, a perfect mother or an impeccable beauty, or on the contrary as overprotective or destructive. She can also pass harsh judgment on behavior society finds unacceptable, such as lapses in etiquette or the pursuit of pleasure.
On the side of your emotions, the reversed card can signal a pulling back from what you feel: you reject your emotions or hold back your desires, particularly sexual ones. In the other direction, it can bring a new clarity: you solve a complicated emotional problem by thinking it through calmly. Upright, the card indicates an approach through feelings and pleasure rather than through reflection.
Her creative force can go awry: your projects grow too large and run out of steam, or you lack creativity and suffer from not being able to create. The traditional meanings of the reversed card are vanity, frivolity, hesitation, lethargy, inaction, anxiety and lack of affection.
On the side of spirituality and magic, she also represents the creator, Mother Earth and the magic of the earth, including contact with the forces of nature as part of the divine feminine. She can also show the terrifying and destructive face of the feminine and of nature.
Your strengths
You can think calmly through an emotional problem to solve it. You can explore the full range of the divine feminine.
What holds you back
- You do not take enough care of yourself or of others.
- You are too devoted and too generous.
- You give in to vanity, superficiality and self-indulgence.
- You do not feel particularly attractive or sensual.
- You hesitate and do not act, out of laziness or lack of drive.
- You withdraw your interest or your support from a project.
- You feel alone and useless, as in an empty house.
- You feel you are seen little for who you are.
- You refuse to listen to your emotions or you hold back your desires.
- Too many possible interpretations can leave you confused.
What helps
- Setting limits on your projects so they do not scatter.
- Setting a budget when you overspend.
- Thinking calmly about what troubles you emotionally.
- Looking for how to be feminine without meeting every expectation.
Money
You may overspend and live in excess, which calls for a budget.
Home
You may let your home go and feel alone and useless there.
What the card shows
The Empress is the third arcanum of the Tarot, the one that comes after the High Priestess. In the Tarot de Marseille, she appears crowned, seated on a throne, with a scepter in one hand and a shield bearing an eagle. This image comes from the medieval world: in the old decks, it stood for female imperial sovereignty, and the eagle points to the Empire and to recognized authority. The meaning of the card nonetheless goes beyond power: it shows the capacity to bring an order into being.
The scepter links above and below. It says that right action does not come from individual whim: human will becomes creative when it stays united with a higher will. Cut off from this source, it hardens and produces only a soulless efficiency. The shield with the eagle evokes height and vision: the eagle sees from above. The Empress therefore acts out of fidelity to a principle, and not only for material efficiency. She stands for life when it stays connected to its origin.
Her face smiles serenely, her blond hair is soft, and a light crown seems to weigh barely anything on her head. Twelve stars circle her head, nine of them visible. This number recalls the Zodiac, by which natural productions and the length of gestation are regulated. She is winged, like the Virgin of the Zodiac, but she carries neither the ear of wheat nor the olive branch: she holds the scepter of universal dominion, because the idea commands and models determine all production. Her coat of arms shows a silver eagle on a purple ground, and the lily at her left symbolizes the charm of purity, gentleness and beauty. Her foot rests on a crescent moon with the points turned downward, which means that she rules the world below, where everything changes constantly.
Her colors have meaning. Her cloak is a luminous azure blue, while the High Priestess's is dark blue.
At the bottom of the card, a white pelican feeds its young with its own blood, and a shield carries a white eagle, the emblem of the alchemist. The pelican stands for the Great Mother and her daughter: there is a continuity of life, an inheritance of blood that binds all forms of nature. The ground is a carpet embroidered with fleurs-de-lis and fish. At the back of the card is an arch or door, which corresponds to the Hebrew letter Dalet, whose meaning is "door": the card can be summed up as the door of heaven. Here all the symbols agree, and you have to look at it as a whole rather than detail by detail.
In the Waite-Smith tarot, the Empress is a seated, pregnant woman in a garden where the red roses are clearly visible. She is the wife of the Emperor, whose card follows hers.
She corresponds to Venus, associated with birth, the arts and beauty. Her number is the sum of 1 and 2, the union of the Magician and the High Priestess: the virginity of the Moon changes into the fertility of Venus. Venus is also the only one of the planetary symbols that touches all the spheres of the Tree of Life, which says that the basic formula of the universe is love. The High Priestess keeps and internalizes; the Empress brings what was held in silence into speech and into effect in the world.
Three also stands for production, expansion, growth, wealth and abundance. With one, everything is merged; with two, action and what receives it are conceived without anything being perceived; with three, light dawns in the mind. On the Tree of Life, Dalet links Wisdom and Understanding, the father and the mother.
In the sense of the mind, she is creative imagination, the power to make new combinations out of what you have lived and retained. What you look at with attention becomes what you are. By changing the images your attention fixes on, this imagination begins to build a new life, including in your surroundings. Your mind then becomes fertile like her garden. The difference between creative imagination and simple fantasy is that the first has a solid basis in fact. Historically, the image spoke of authority, and spiritually it speaks of fertility: it is the drive of growth that comes before the Emperor's stable law.
Your strengths
You have a creative imagination that builds something new from what you have lived. You know love, beauty, pleasure, elegance and friendship.
What holds you back
- You can spend too much, love luxury and show off superficial knowledge.
- You can pose, be affected, try to seduce.
- Cut off from what grounds you, you produce a soulless efficiency, and your life dries up.
What helps
Stay connected to what grounds you; without living faith or love, your life dries up. Fix your attention on the opposite of images of fear and lack. Look closely at your problem: the answer is found in the problem itself. Base your imagination on real facts.
