The Empress Card
Fecund. Sensual. Embodied. Passionate. Fertile. Creative. Emotional.
These are all words associated with the Empress card, the third trump in the Major Arcana. She is rich with abundance from her rulership over nature. In the Smith-Waite version of the card, she is enthroned in a lush, verdant setting; field of wheat in front of her, a forest behind her, and a river flows through it all.
The Empress directly follows the High Priestess card and is said to represent the contrasting/complementary so-called “feminine” principle. Where the High Priestess is the intuition, then the Empress is the senses.
From my blog post about the High Priestess:
“The High Priestess is a singular person yet she is part of a bigger whole. She is the void where the Empress is fullness in that reprehensible patriarchal styling of women as the virgin/whore dichotomy. Even though I reject that dichotomy as a feminist, I do embrace the crone energy of the High Priestess. She is not about women’s power of procreation, she is about the deep, internal knowing of intuition, something oft attributed to women specifically.
I must note that for so long, the High Priestess and Empress have been written about through the lens of the gender binary. I think it is very important to reject this forced binary and at the same time pay respect to the goddesses that inform their meanings.”
From left to right: Smith-Waite (aka Rider Waite Tarot), Thoth Tarot, Modern Witch Tarot, and Morgan-Greer Tarot Empress cards.
It is near to impossible for me to speak about the Empress without mention of Venus, her planetary/archetypal, counterpart. Indeed, the Empress bears the symbol of Venus, Roman Goddess of love & war, on her heart-shaped shield. In traditional astrology, Venus has a warm and moist quality or temperament, that creates the conditions for fertility, relating, bonding, and enjoyment of the senses, just like the Empress.
There are several goddesses she is connected to by virtue of the overlapping world pantheons and directly through symbolism of the card. The fields of wheat are reference to Demeter, goddess of agriculture, and through the pomegranates on her dress, Demeter’s daughter, Persephone. The symbolic relationship to Demeter and Persephone also underscores the Empress as a figure of motherhood and as the Great Mother, or Mother Nature. (See also Gaia and Rhea.) The Empress wears a crown of 12 stars and a necklace of pearls (planets) to represent her rulership of the heavens as well as the Earth, like Nut, Egyptian goddess of the sky.
Inanna, Ishtar, Anat, Astarte, Gaia, Rhea, Nephthys, Nut, Aphrodite/Venus, Demeter, Persephone, and I’m sure we could add Freyja to the list. These are just some of the goddesses that lend the Empress her meanings of love, sex, fertility, motherhood, the natural world, creativity, and the cycles of life & death.
In her book, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, author Rachel Pollack says of the Empress card:
“Until we learn to experience the outer world completely we cannot hope to transcend it. Therefore the first step to enlightenment is sensuality. Only through passion, can we sense, from deep inside rather than through intellectual argument, the spirit that fills all existence.”
Through this lens of the body and senses we can come to experience nature as something holy and ourselves as part of nature and not apart from it. Pollack goes on to discuss the inclination of patriarchal society to see nature as impure or dirty and apart from spirituality/religion and godliness. This serves to emphasize the connection of the Empress card to goddess worship and pre-Christian notions that do away with the duality of divinity versus nature. When we embody the Empress within us all, our bodies are both natural and divine.
Authors, Akron and Banzhaf, in their discussion of the Thoth deck’s Empress card (painted by Lady Frieda Harris and conceived of by Aleister Crowley) say, “She is the symbol of creative formation through which the as yet formless idea becomes mother of the material.” In this sense, I always think of the Empress card as the card of the artist. In an effort to disconnect the Empress from the gender binary but also to honour their goddexx roots, I can imagine this card as the creator, one who brings forth the materials of their “body” (nature, the senses, art & interpretation, passion) to make new forms of life/art.
In my interpretation for the pendant version of the Empress I focused on the pomegranate and the wheat representing the myth of Persephone (who ate the pomegranate seeds) and Demeter, Persephone’s mother and the goddess of agriculture (the wheat). The honeybee queen represents the sovereignty of the Empress over nature’s abundance and also the efforts of the artist and the farmer to create their works and tend their crops.
On the reverse of the pendant is the heart-shaped shield with Venus’ glyph from the Waite-Smith version of the card. Above the heart is the Empress’ crown of 12 stars, representing the night sky and the 12 signs of the zodiac.
Bibliography
Pollack, R. (2007). Seventy eight degrees of wisdom. San Francisco, CA: Red Wheel/Weiser.
Akron & Banzhaf, H. (1995). The Crowley Tarot - TheHandbook to the Cards by Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris. Stamford, CT: U.S. Games Systems, Inc.
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