The Empress is the great mother of the manifest world, abundant nature, fertile creativity, and sensual beauty made flesh. She is fruitfulness, initiative, action, long days; she too is part of the clandestine, explorer in the sacred unknowns; thricemore she is consistently filled with difficulty, doubt, ignorance -- for creation is never without labor. Empress bridges Wisdom and Understanding, the union that births all form. Reversed: Light, truth, the unraveling of involved matters, public rejoice, and according to another reading, vacillation (or indecision).

UPRIGHT: Fruitfulness, Initiative, Action, The Unknown

REVERSED: Light, Truth, Public rejoicing, Vacillation

The Empress is a bountiful card, beautiful woman with crown of stars and golden scepter, reclining on crimson, a luscious dress of strawberries enfolding the voluptuous divine feminine. Her countenance assured, she sits upon a heart of stone, Edenic river-forest background and waves of wheat foregrounding. The Empress can represent the absolute health of the realm, the aspiring fertility of your kingdom. Or the raw unknown, the awe-full reality of facing Mother Nature. Beautifully terrifying things, speaking of scale and morality, are done in the name of women by men, just as they do in the name of The Future or Paradise. Even reversed, her light cannot be denied; upside-down Empress becomes raw truth or rejoice or the cycling of many choices, leading on the realization that you may indeed have an embarrassment of riches before you.

On the journey, the hero gets going, makes good ground, achieves a serious victory, or goes headlong into the maw of the greater unmanifest…

Bottom Line: When you encounter your Empress, best to listen, learn, and do your best to amplify her radiance.

Tree of Life Path: Chokmah to Binah -- raw wisdom intersecting with divine understanding; she is the union that births the realms and makes the forms we see in the world.

A.E. Waite quote: “She is above all things universal fecundity and the outer sense of the Word…In another order of ideas, the card of the Empress signifies the door or gate by which an entrance is obtained into this life, as into the Garden of Venus; and then the way which leads out therefrom, into that which is beyond, is the secret known to the High Priestess: it is communicated by her to the elect.”

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