The Empress

The Empress has changed less between the fifteenth century and the present than almost any other trump, which makes her useful as a control. A seated crowned woman with a shield or an eagle appears in the earliest hand-painted Milanese decks, in the French woodblock pattern, and in the twentieth-century occult decks, and the through-line is unbroken. Where other trumps were renamed, renumbered, moralised or quietly dropped, she was simply reprinted.

That stability is itself worth noticing, because it undercuts a common assumption. If the tarot were an encoded doctrine, one would expect the doctrinal cards to be the stable ones and the decorative cards to drift. What actually happened is the reverse. The cards that moved most, the female pope, the pope, the Devil, the Tower, moved because they were socially awkward, not because they were doctrinally important. The Empress stayed put because a crowned woman with a shield offended nobody.

Her fifteenth-century sense is straightforwardly civic. She is temporal authority in its female form, paired with the Emperor as the Popess is paired with the Pope: two secular powers and two ecclesiastical ones, at the bottom of the trump order, above the tricksters and below the virtues. The reading of her as Nature, fertility, Demeter and the generative principle is a later overlay, arriving with the occultists in the nineteenth century and reinforced by the wheat and the pomegranates in the 1909 drawing. It is a good reading. It is not the one a Milanese card-player would have recognised.

The Golden Dawn assigned the third trump the letter Daleth, the planet Venus, and the fourteenth path of the Tree of Life, joining Chokmah to Binah, the horizontal path across the top of the Tree, between the two supernal parents. Like all such assignments this one dates from the late nineteenth century and rests on Eliphas Levi's system of the 1850s, which in turn rests on the Comte de Mellet's 1781 pairing of the trumps with the Hebrew alphabet. The Venus attribution is the least contested part of the whole apparatus, because it agrees with what the picture had always suggested anyway.

In practice the card is read across a consistent band: abundance, growth already under way, creative work bearing fruit, nurture, and material comfort. A second and slightly different sense treats her as authority exercised through provision rather than through command, which distinguishes her usefully from the Emperor rather than merely feminising him.

The readings most often lost are the harder ones. Nurture that has become smothering, abundance that has made effort unnecessary, and a comfort that quietly forecloses change are all within the card's range, and Waite's reversed meanings gesture at them. Readers who do not use reversals generally get there by context: an Empress surrounded by cards of stagnation says something different from an Empress beside the Ace of Wands. Both approaches reach the same place, and the disagreement between them is about mechanism rather than meaning. What neither approach supports is the sentimental habit of treating the Empress as unambiguously benign; she is the card of what grows, and not everything that grows is wanted.