The Empress

“I can cast a spell of secrets you can tell
Mix a special brew, put fire inside of you
Anytime you feel danger or fear
Then instantly I will appear, ’cause

I’m every woman
It’s all in me
Anything you want done baby
I do it naturally

Oh, I can sense your needs like rain onto the seeds
I can make a rhyme of confusion in your mind
And when it comes down to some good old fashioned love
I got it, I got it, I got it, got it, baby, baby

I’m every woman
It’s all in me
Anything you want done baby
I do it naturally”

‘I’m Every Woman’ by Chaka Khan (Nickolas/Valerie)

Welcome to the loving embrace of the Empress. Pretty much every time I do a career reading for myself she comes up, and I’m like “YES, THANK YOU FOR THAT LITERALISM, TAROT, I AM WELL AWARE I THINK MOTHERHOOD HAS TORPEDOED MY CAREER” lol.

Anyway… Here she is, the constant gardener, mother of the world, with the universe as her jewellery. Telling us all to live in our wild, natural bodies and listen to what they’re telling us. Be sensual, be bold, be passionate. But remember, sometimes a new venture cannot begin without destruction to fertilise the ground. If things go wrong she will be there, ready to dry our tears, a soft place to land.

In ‘traditional’ RWS imagery, the Empress is often shown with a crown of twelve stars. These stars are taken to represent the twelve cycles we so often see repeating in the natural world – the 12 months of the year (and 12 signs in the zodiac), the 12 hours of the clock. Her crown therefore shows her rule over the natural order of things – seasons, growth, the passage of time. It is under her rule that all the flora and fauna of the world flourish. But her rule is on her terms – you cannot rush the harvest, or rush nightfall, or rush birth. Good things take time to come to fruition, and the Empress reminds us not only of the virtues of patience, but also of the pleasures of taking our own sweet time. There is so much joy to be had in the small pleasures that we see when we but take a moment to stop and be in the moment: “forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the wind longs to play with your hair” (Khahil Gibran). As Jen Cownie & Fiona Lensvelt write, “good things come to those who wait – but they can come while you wait, too”. Or, as the novelist Franz Kafka once wrote, “simply wait, be quiet, still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet”.

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?-

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows:

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

‘Leisure’ by W.H. Davies

In addition, The Empress carries a rod with an orb on top – representing both her ‘feminine’ energy and the Earth itself. She is, after all, the Queen of all earthy, sensual, embodied things. She also sits near a heart-shaped shield decorated with the symbol for Venus – goddess of fertility, prosperity, and victory, as well as love and sex. The Venus glyph can also be seen as depicting the spirit (cross) made flesh (the circle). The Empress is all about the pleasures of the flesh!

She is historically shown as wearing a dress decorated with our old friend, the pomegranate (for more on the pomegranate in Tarot, see my High Priestess blog here).

Rich with sweet seeds, and with a pretty vulvic vibe going on, the pomegranate is a symbol of fertility and lush, natural female beauty. The fruit reminds us of the stories of both Persephone (the High Priestess) & Demeter (the Empress) and the continuity of life each Spring; and the earth goddess Cybele, the Great Mother, whose lover’s blood formed the first pomegranate tree, and who acted as the mediator between the boundaries of the known and the unknown, the civilised and the wild, the worlds of the living and the dead.

RWS-themed decks also have the Empress sat by a field of ripe wheat, again linking her with Demeter, the goddess of abundance and harvests. If we look at Greco-Roman depictions of Demeter we can clearly see parallels between how she is imagined and how the Empress is drawn:

Demeter is the giver of Earthly gifts, the great, fertile mother goddess. Again here the imagery serves to drive home the Empress’s message that life has to be lived according to the cycles of nature: harvest, conception, birth, seasons. We can work with these things and harness their rhythms, but they have their own timings, and will not be controlled by us. The Empress is not about power and control (we have enough of that coming up with the Emperor, Hierophant, and Chariot!), she is about relationships, cooperation, and working with natural laws and energy. She knows how to wait, and knows the dangers of forcing things before they are ready / not yet ripe. There is a time and tide for everything, but it may not be our choice of timing! She tells us that when we have to put time and effort into creating something, we value the fruits of our labours all the more.

Finally, the Empress is often shown on red cushions – with red being the colour of passion, sensuality, and love – as well as the lifeblood that sings inside all of us.

A lot of decks show a bounteously pregnant Empress (more on that later), but I love the fact that the Slow Tarot Empress appears to be post-partum, and actually looks like she has given birth (ah hello jelly belly, hello worn out boobs!) And is that a red sheet she’s sitting on (like the sensual red cushions in the RWS), or is she nourishing that wheat field with her own blood? Again, she looks worn. The fruitful mother of thousands, but also one of us, of the earth, earthy. Similarly, the Witches Wisdom Tarot shows the Empress literally birthing fruit & flowers from her womb. And poppies; the colour red once again showing not just passion and abundance, but the sacrifice and sorrow that comes with both nature and motherhood. Pavlov has chosen red as the only ‘colour pop’ on his Empress card too, and we see her offering to the viewer not a pomegranate as I first thought, but her own heart. This reminds me of Meg Jones Wall’s writings on the Empress, where she explains that the Empress embodies generosity, in both body and spirit. When we are in the energy of the Empress “our hearts are on display, a vulnerable and exhilarating experience… There’s a kind of nourishment that happens when we let others in, a mutual exchange of energy that feeds us on a spiritual level”. But the Empress does not just offer up her bounty, she delights in the bounties offered to her, and asks us to, too. Bakara Wintner explains that, “The Empress is never depleted because she knows how to accept love as well as give it. The crucial flaw we make as mere humans and not perfect tarot archetypes is that many of us are skilled at nurturing and offering care to others, but do not know how to absorb it when it is offered to us.”

The Empress card is superficially pretty straightforward – she is a fertile womb where anything can grow and thrive (as opposed to the protective ‘incubator’ of the High Priestess). However, this does not mean the Empress is reducible to a literal womb or literal pregnancy (or that her energy is literal femininity). Rather, she is about the patience and care required to nurture any new thing into flowering abundance: “like a newly planted garden or a newborn babe, a new life, a new relationship, a new creation is fragile… It needs love and attention. Only this will bring it to fruition” (Aeclectic Tarot). The Empress rules with a soft hand not because she lacks strength, or the capacity for force, but because she doesn’t need to demonstrate either of those things to achieve results. As Jen Cownie and Fiona Lensvelt explain, “she knows that things grown in love bloom the brightest. She knows that it is impossible to be spoiled by goodness – only by coldness and withholding. The Empress reminds us never to starve the things we care about.”

In Praise of a Pregnant Empress

Obviously pregnancy and childbearing (as well as all the associated sexist and often transphobic bullshit that reduces womanhood to vaginas, cervixes, and wombs) is a contentious and painful topic for many of us, which I feel, sisters. But I do nevertheless have a bit of a soft spot for a preggo Empress. Childbearing is an important part of the human lifecycle. We are all born, and we all die (and we all pay taxes, lol). They really are the two most universal human experiences, and therefore arguably the two greatest Tarot archetypes: birth and death. And as Pen and Inkling writes, “the Empress isn’t the only place we could locate this idea [of birth], but she is the obvious and traditional place – and Tarot is inherently traditional and reliant on shared reference-points to build meaning”.

Pregnancy is also a good way to illustrate the natural sense of wonderment inherent in the Empress card – the stupefaction of excess we sometimes feel when we allow ourselves to exult in the glories of the natural world and the everyday miracles of nature. Maddy Elruna notes that every pregnancy carries with it a sense of awe and wonder – how can our bodies create a living being? How can a whole new person be growing inside us? (I often feel this when I look at my two kids. I think: like, I literally made you. You, a whole unique little person with your own dreams and thoughts. I made you with my body. How wild is that???). Elruna goes on to note that pregnancy is often a time when we are fully engaged with our bodies, and have to cede control to their innate wisdom. It is a time of both messy excess and primal rootedness. And this is even more the case during the process of birthing itself. When writing about her experiences of transition (the insanely painful bit where the baby is like: hey, I’m ready to come out now), she writes, “I lost all sense of myself, yet was more deeply in myself than I have ever been. It is the moment you truly let go”. And as any midwife will tell you, you shouldn’t fight the transition! Your body knows what it’s doing. Elruna concludes, “[Yet] I have seen this so often in clients, they have planned for, worked at, built towards a change. Yet the moment it starts to happen they resist this change. Fear overcomes, they lose trust, they start to self-sabotage. Life is change, change is life. Accept that rhythm, abandon yourself to the change when you see the Empress, and trust”.

Some of my favourite pregante Empresses here. As her veins turn in to the branches of the tree she leans against, the Bonestone & Earthflesh Tarot Empress also flags the importance of “environmental care and the nurturing of the planet”. I love the serene grace of the Curious Travels Empress, and the Tarot of the Crystal World Empress has stretch marks! Yesssssss!

Obviously womanhood is not dependent on pregnancy, and many women won’t, don’t, or can’t get pregnant. But whether you have biological children or not, you will at times provide guidance, mentorship, and care for those who are younger or less knowledgeable or strong than you. You don’t have to be a mother to “mother”. So I also enjoy representations of the Empress as mother.

I really love the every day grace of the Urban Tarot. Here we have the mundanity and exhaustion of motherhood, but also the joy and the fulfilment. I love the stars circling her tired but happy face, and the window that looks like the world. On the other hand, the Empress card by Mvndeep for the Alleyman Tarot calls back to my opening paragraph – sometimes motherhood feels like a heavy burden, a chain that keeps you from your old pleasures, that sucks the life out of you. We must be mindful not to give too much of ourselves when providing for others. And the Blood Moon Tarot calls to the most prolific of all mothers, the Queen Bee: “Bees are nourished by the hive and go out into the world, returning with pollen to create honey. The Empress is the queen bee, the jewelled fruit, the keeper of abundance, and she generously shares that magic with us”.

Obviously the Empress can also be about the more negative aspects of maternal love. She can be smothering, unable to cede control, and be possessive and jealous of those who try to take away her “baby”. There is a balance to be struck – whether raising kids or growing a garden – between nurture and oppression. In true Empress energy we are mindful that we need to have the patience and ability to adjust and improvise as the idea we have nurtured into reality sprouts and grows. While the Empress is a wonderful card, “a delightful primal energy… There is a time for boundaries to be re-established. Rules to be put in place, a time to move on to the Emperor” (Maddy Elruna).

In Praise of a Fat Empress

The Empress is also the card where I most often see fatness celebrated, and this makes my heart happy! Jen Cownie & Fiona Lensvelt describe the Empress as “a lovely ripe fruit of a woman” (NB if Giles Conran said this I would be sick in my mouth, by JC & FL can say it because they’re bad ass witches!), and a fat Empress calls back to the archetypal idea of the Empress as Venus, as ancient fertility goddess, the world’s abundance pouring from between her voluptuous thighs.

Jen Cownie & Fiona Lensvelt go on to note that the Empress’s “presence has weight and gravity: she is of the earth, bound to it, and greatly pleased by it. She is languorous and beautiful and radiates fecundity and richness… She invites you to think about nurture: about the things you care for until they ripen into lusciousness”.

I love all three of these fat and fabulous Empresses (No sophisticated poetry here, just the immortal words of the late, great Prince: “I like ’em fat / I like ’em proud / Ya gotta have a mother for me / Now move your big ass ’round this way / So I can work on that zipper, baby“).

Wild Women Do (And They Don’t Regret It)

I’ve focussed a lot on the Empress as a mother (i.e. responsible), but there is also a certain wildness to the card. In Tarot For Change Jessica Dore quotes Donna Eden: “Becoming civilised is, to a large extent, learning not to do what your body wants you to do”.  So much of our time is spent ignoring the needs, desires, and pleasures of our body, until we become almost estranged from it. Dore goes on to note, “in our culture we are conditioned to prize intellectual knowing and neglect intuitive or body knowing. We are taught science alone is real and that other ways of knowing are fantastical or unreliable”. She thinks that part of the reason people love the Empress so much is therefore because “we long to be in our bodies, but have forgotten how, and she shows us what it would feel like if we could. Many of us think of the wild as something ‘out there’, and I think that’s sad for us. It shows how cut off we are from the fact that somewhere, deep down and old, we are still the wild, and the body – with all its cycles and rhythms and ebbs and flows and generation and degeneration – is proof”. 

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?
Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?
Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.
Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.

‘I Worried’ by Mary Oliver

I love these wild Empresses. In the Mushroom Hunter’s Tarot, the Empress is represented by the abundant, delicious Pink Oyster mushroom. The WayHome Tarot shows the Empress as the heart of the world, the love that nourishes us from roots to leaves, the great fertile joyous glory of life. And the Pholarchos Tarot depicts an Empress who “constantly gives birth, every molecule a ladybug spinning ecstasy… Her heart is a conference of a thousand wild roses”.

Finally, I love the design choices in the below decks: the flare of the Spiritual Tarot’s Empress’s dress, the Gustav Klimt-esque beauty of the I Am The Artist Tarot, and the faceless glory of the Hayworth Tarot.

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