The Empress and The Emperor

The Empress and The Emperor: In this post we shall explore these two cards of the major Arcana in tarot. I want to explore them as two archetypes which are constantly working in unity and as parts that complement each other. They can be interpreted as divine partners: each existing in their unique form yet needing one another to create further. They can be interpreted in our lives as mother, father, woman, man, essence of soul qualia, ideals and practical forces in the world.

The Empress, Daughter of the Mighty Ones

The Empress: Ruled by Venus

Let us start with card III, The Empress, Daughter of the Mighty Ones. She is the earthly form of Venus in the green living world. This is Venus expressed here in the natural world. Venus is the goddess of the fecundity of the grounds and sky united. Of the living regions of earth and the earth itself is a living conscious being. This is fertility itself.

She is the patron goddess of many things such as love (and at times war), connection, art, beauty, money, pleasure, growth, and cultivation (therefore culture). In the Empress card these things are expressed physically in the world of woman and mankind.

She is known esoterically as the Gate of Heaven and Kabbalah with the Hebrew letter, Daleth, meaning Door. We arise in this world through the door, the portal of woman, the vesica pisces. In other words, via the womb and vagina or birth canal. She is also firstly the divine mother, residing in the supernal world beyond the abyss.

The abyss is the great divide containing the mystery of the vast heavens of life between life and all of the ineffable creative emptiness and possibility. What a beautiful thing a body is! We are the earth itself experiencing a human form. This is a card of creative life force, raw or domesticated.

Emperor, Chief Among the Mighty

The Emperor: Ruled by Aries
which is governed by Mars

The Emperor is card IV, Chief among the Mighty. He is the card of Aries, the great masculine force of initiation, drive, will, force, creative spirit, leadership, disseminator of humankind’s knowledge, society, culture and fatherliness.

With the Empress card we had pure unfiltered direct Venusian influence. Not so with the Emperor. Mars has his intermediary of the zodiacal sign of Aries to work his magic within The Emperor. Too much direct Mars energy and we get The Tower, its associated Trump.

In the case of The Emperor, we need the guiding hand of Aries of the zodiac. We need a self starter, a go getter, a person with drive and craftiness. He is indeed a craftsman. He shapes the matter into other forms. He is a father you can count on to help shape yourself as well. He is a part of each of us, again regardless of our gender or body.

As Venus sits upon an earthen throne, The Emperor sits in his thinking chair, a throne made by his own hands. He has to make important decisions and get down to business. We all need to embrace this practical manner to make our lives work well for the soul’s journey this time around!

We have culture (cultivated from Venus) and society (built with the Emperor). We inherit our lives from our ancestors and we borrow the earth from our children, so raising them with lessons and meaning is the most important job there is. Hopefully he creates with a sense of relationship and connection, the gift from his divine partner. Within this relationship he is sitting in a cauldron of benevolence. If he is out of balance, he can become a tyrant. These possibilities exist inside all of us, as we contain multitudes. So guidance that always includes ethics in all things is his gift.

How to Interpret The Empress & Emperor in Tarot Readings

With these cards we often clearly see a person in our lives we associate with either of them. It could be our own mother or father or caretakers. It could be our romantic partners or friends. And they certainly tell us about ourselves.

Do we have childhood wounding that came from our experiences with our parents? Do we need to repair those relationships and/or re-parent ourselves? In what ways are we enacting the roles of The Empress or Emperor?

I enjoy these cards because they include masculine and feminine energies that are all around us in the universe and in all people. In this age, many of us are reevaluating what that means to us and healing generational trauma where the wounded masculine and feminine shaped our predecessors. It is a messy but valorous effort.

We may have also experienced the best parts of those two forces and have worked hard to rectify and then amplify a healthy exploration of these energies. Cheers to any and all of us willing to embrace our own soft and courageous inner Empress and Emperor!

Additional Considerations: Earth, Matter and The Universe

Out of the vastness of the universe of matter there is also endemic consciousness that is fundamental to matter. A mind that dreamed up creation of the physical as well as other dimensions that comprise the whole of reality. We humans can only sense or intuit small portions of this greater mystery. We are born of a woman, mother, and man, father (although we can have parents and caretakers of any gender, body and self-identity). Mother and matter come from the same Latin root word “matr” meaning mother and forms the basis for many words such as material, matriarch, matter.

Our bodies, the matter of our form, are yet another form of matter of earth. The earth is formed from the matter of the combustion of our star that formed our solar system. The sun and any concreting planets are formed from the forging and merging of particles that miraculously create a sustaining heat that makes life here possible. Those particles came into being by consciousness that desired to experience form. Where did that desire come from? Love.

Out of this oneness of the world comes two beings, the divine mother and divine father, of which each of us is both. We contain both in our spirit and some of each in our bodies. Truly a marvel! And we are of a divine nature but also we are experiencing this down-to-earth form of human people. These two energies have the potential to achieve mastery and delight or to be stuck in shadow and not recognized. So it all comes down to our karma and what we do with the naturally bestowed gifts of The Empress and The Emperor. We can also witness these archetypes beyond ourselves in the greater world. And when they show up in a reading they are often showing us parts of ourselves AND parts of the field around us. And where exactly are we? That is mysterious indeed.

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