Major Arcana · 3
The Empress
L'Impératrice (Tarot de Marseille) · L'Imperatrice (Italian tarocchi) · The Daughter of the Mighty Ones (Golden Dawn)
A crowned woman at ease in a field of ripening grain. In the Waite–Smith tradition the Empress stands for abundance, growth, care and the creative power of nature.
Upright abundance · fertility · nurture · creativity · nature · sensuality · comfort
Reversed dependence · smothering · creative block · neglect of self · excess · stagnation
- Astrology
- Venus
- Element
- Earth
- Hebrew letter
- Daleth
- Number
- 3
- Golden Dawn title
- The Daughter of the Mighty Ones
- Yes or no
- Yes
Upright
The Empress is the tarot's image of fruitfulness. In the Waite–Smith tradition she signifies growth, beauty, comfort and the patient care that lets things ripen. Her energy is generous and embodied: she speaks of the senses, the home and the natural world.
Love and relationships: warmth, affection and a relationship that nourishes both people. Readers often connect her with pregnancy or family, though she can equally signify the birth of a shared project or a deepening of tenderness.
Work and money: steady growth, creative output and work that is allowed to mature. She favours the arts, design, gardening, hospitality and caring professions, and she counsels investing in quality rather than speed.
Advice: tend what you have planted. Rest, beauty and good food are not luxuries in this card's reading of life but part of how anything healthy grows.
Reversed
Reversed, the Empress's abundance can sour into its shadow forms. Readers name smothering care, dependence, over-indulgence, or putting everyone else's needs first until nothing is left. Another strand concerns creative block: the field is there, but nothing is growing because of exhaustion, doubt or neglect.
In relationships it may describe possessiveness or one partner carrying all the emotional labour. In work it can suggest a project starved of attention or a comfort zone that has become a rut.
Since many readers do not use reversals, these themes are often drawn instead from the cards beside an upright Empress.
The image
The Waite–Smith Empress reclines on a cushioned seat in an open landscape. A field of golden wheat ripens at her feet; behind her stand tall cypresses and a waterfall feeding a stream. She wears a crown of twelve stars and a loose white gown patterned with pomegranates, and she holds a sceptre topped with a small globe. Propped against her seat is a heart-shaped shield bearing the astrological sign of Venus. The whole picture is soft, green and gold, a deliberate contrast to the stone and armour of the next card.
History
The Empress is among the oldest trump subjects. Fifteenth-century Italian cards show a crowned lady holding a shield with the imperial eagle, the consort of the Emperor in a sequence of worldly rulers. The Tarot de Marseille keeps the eagle shield and a sceptre. Court de Gébelin and the French occultists read her as a queen of nature or Isis; Éliphas Lévi linked her with generation and the word.
The Golden Dawn gave her the planet Venus and the letter Daleth, and Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) describes her as the inferior Garden of Eden and the earthly paradise. Smith's pastoral setting, with no eagle in sight, made her a nature goddess for the modern deck.
Symbolism
The wheat signifies harvest and the fruitfulness of labour; the pomegranates on her gown echo the veil of the High Priestess, suggesting that the mystery hidden there is here made visible in living things. The twelve stars recall the woman of the Apocalypse and the twelve signs of the zodiac. Water flowing from the trees speaks of emotion and life force feeding the land.
Number three is the product of union, creativity and expansion — two becoming three. In the Golden Dawn scheme her letter Daleth means "door", and her path joins Chokmah and Binah across the top of the Tree of Life, uniting the supernal father and mother.
In a reading
The Empress softens surrounding cards and favours growth, patience and care. With the Emperor she forms the archetypal pair of nurture and structure; with the Ten of Pentacles she points to family prosperity; with the Four of Cups she may ask whether comfort has become complacency. In an outcome position she is read as a gentle, positive result that arrives in its season, not overnight.
Sources and further reading
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot — A. E. Waite, 1910
- The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City — Michael Dummett, 1980
- Tarot for Your Self — Mary K. Greer, 1984
- The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination — Robert M. Place, 2005