Tarot: The EMPRESS
Creativity, Abundance, Transformation & Life
What you see:
A regal woman sits in the middle of a fertile landscape, leaning back and relaxing in a throne upholstered with sumptuous cushions. She wears a flowing, pink robe adorned with red roses. She fixes us with a calm, clear gaze and holds out a golden scepter in her right, active hand, the tip of which is adorned with a sphere reminiscent of the ball of the sun or a pomegranate. In her blonde hair, she wears a crown adorned with laurel branches and twelve stars. A heart-shaped shield with the sign of Venus leans against her throne.
Welcome to the realm of the Empress!
What you get:
In the sequence of the major arcana, the Empress follows the Popess. The two arcana represent two fundamental, powerful archetypes of the feminine principle that are closely connected. With the Empress, the sacred source of the Popess’ intuition swells into the river of life. We shift from introspection to creation.
Oh yes! In a reading, the sight of the Empress has most questioners' eyes shine bright. No wonder! The powerful Empress represents beautiful and most desirable qualities such as abundance, lust, love, success, vitality, health, fertility, happiness and creativity. All of them in truly superhuman portions.
However, as with all major arcana, the path to these gifts holds real challenges. We must remember that the tarot is never about simply taking the gift, but rather about internalizing and embodying essential qualities. And, especially with the Empress, we shouldn't be fooled... She may seem sweet, relaxed and even harmless. In truth, she is radical, powerful and - in the performance-oriented times in which we live – highly disruptive and very political.
So, my dear, buckle up and let's take a closer look at this card and its meaning...
Creativity as a Way of Being
The Empress is the great artist of the Tarot and the embodiment of infinite life. She leads you back to your sovereign creative power and a relaxed state of self-efficacy.
She is by no means a self-exploitative worker in the art industry. She is a fecund creator. And she is asking you to finally switch from your obsessive productivity to a state of true creation, too. “Stop managing your life, start creating it.” In this message, the Empress is radical. Political. And quite sexy. She embodies the principle of grounding and growing, fading and becoming. She acts cyclically, rhythmically, anti-capitalistically. In a society in which the propaganda of scarcity, this constant “not quite enough yet” whips us collectively into burnout, the Empress reminds you that there is more than enough.
Even though she is enjoying midsummer and harvest time, the Empress is not afraid of fall and winter. Her trust in life is so deep that she is ready to die at any time in order to rise again.
She takes charge instead of control.
The Empress' creativity is grounded in an attitude of radical presence and complete acceptance of what is. In doing so, she helps us to melt our tendency to fixate, control and conceptualize, and to cease from seeing our life process as an endless act of accumulation and optimization. Instead, we begin to understand that our growing and thriving involves a constant process of dissolution, transformation and “dying”.
In this way, She – the card number three - already points ahead to her counterpart, the nameless arcanum number thirteen, which we also know as “Death”. Three and thirteen relate to each other like two sides of the same coin. (Alejandro Jodorowsky and Marianne Costa explain in The Way of the Tarot the inner connection between the pairs of tens, which echo the theme of the lower arcanum as if on a higher octave. For example, Fool (0) and Wheel of Fortune (X), Pope (V) and Tower (XV), or Chariot (VII) and Star (XVII).
With the Empress we begin to understand that our growing and thriving involves a constant process of dissolution, transformation and “dying”, too.
Don’t push: Act!
The cushions do not mean that you should take it all easy with the Empress and wait for the grapes to grow in your mouth and the coins to fall into your lap. The Empress is not the kind little girl from the famous fairy tale The Star Money. She is a grown-up, potent woman with power and boundaries. The cushions she rests on are here to remind you of the ability and necessity to finally get out of survival mode and relax deeply into the present moment. Do Yoga Nidra or take a sabbatical. Meditate, breathe, ground, and recenter yourself in your sovereignty.
And then grab the proud scepter of your initiative, power, and agency. And do so quite pragmatically. For from her groundedness, the Empress doesn’t need to wait anxiously for the perfect moment, the ideal astrological constellation, or the right song. Rather, she follows the solid motto coined by Theodor Roosevelt:
“Do what you can, with what you've got, where you are.”
Scepter and pillow. Phallus and Yoni. Yin and yang. Rest and Action. The Queen of the Tarot embodies both the stimulating, creative impulse, and the Daoist principle of Wu Wei, “action through inaction”. It does not mean to remain inactive, but to act in alignment with the cycles of the cosmos. With the Empress you learn to rule by surrendering. With her your potential is unfolding gracefully. Your life force finds its natural flow and expression.