Draw a card · What is tarot? · Major Arcana

The Empress

MAJOR ARCANA · III

The Empress is card III of the major arcana. Among ripe wheat, a woman wearing a crown of stars sits at her ease. Upright, she stands for abundance, fruition and love; reversed, for overindulgence, stagnation and giving too much.

Name and number

Upright meaning

Keywords: abundance, fruition, nurturing, love, creation

If the High Priestess is wisdom held within, the Empress is that wisdom overflowing and taking form. The fields are ripe, water flows, and flowers bloom.

The upright Empress stands for a time when what you have grown bears fruit: results at work, deepening relationships, a sense of a full and contented life. She also stands for nurturing, motherly love that cares for people and things, for enjoying life through the senses, and for the creativity that brings beautiful things into being. In love she points to an affectionate relationship; at work, to something long tended finally coming to fruit.

Reversed meaning

Keywords: overindulgence, stagnation, giving too much, idleness

Reversed, the Empress's abundance is read as having gone too far and grown heavy.

Spoiling people, fussing over them so much that you hold back their growth, or binding them through what you give. For yourself, it can mean sinking into comfort and being unable to move, or satisfying yourself in the wrong ways, like eating or buying too much. It can also be read the other way: a time when life feels dry, and nothing seems to bear fruit.

What the picture shows

• The crown of twelve stars: said to stand for the twelve months or the twelve signs, showing a woman who governs the cycles of nature.
• The heart-shaped shield with the sign of Venus: Venus (♀) is the planet of love and beauty, the Empress's very nature.
• Ripe wheat: harvest and abundance, read alongside the image of a goddess guarding the fruits of the earth.
• The waterfall and the cypress woods: the endless flow of life, and trees that stay green.
• Soft cushions and robes: her robe, patterned with pomegranates, is said to be a sign of fertility and plenty.

History

The Empress was born as one of four cards, with the Emperor, the Pope and the Popess, that represented the powers of the world.

In the fifteenth-century Italian Visconti–Sforza deck, a woman in rich clothes and a crown sits enthroned, holding the eagle emblem of the Holy Roman Empire. To people of the time she was first of all a real empress.

In the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Tarot of Marseille, too, the Empress sits facing us with a scepter and an eagle shield. She is drawn as if facing the Emperor, and the two cards form a pair.

When nineteenth-century esoteric writers reinterpreted tarot, the Empress shifted from an earthly empress to a goddess of nature and fertility. The Rider–Waite–Smith deck replaced the eagle shield with a shield of Venus and moved her throne from a palace to wheat fields and woods, drawing her as a goddess of harvest.

Correspondences

Previous and next cards

• Previous: 2 The High Priestess
• Next: 4 The Emperor
• The major arcana

Lucky colors for The Empress