Cosmic Tribe Tarot

III - EMPRESS

Empress, Queen of May, to you we owe the inspired abundance of life. You miraculously generate the biological festival that distinguishes our earthly existence. You are the primal productivity, the boundless generosity inherent in our garden planet's special purpose of feeding and inspiring the universe.

Mother Nature reveals herself as the human Empress to help us understand her awesome powers. The tremendous diversity of life, including our conscious experience, springs from her. She is abundant profusion.

She is mother to us all and to all of our endeavors. As represented by the moon above her, she is periodic and sweeps grandly through eons of time. With the Empress, life recycles from glorious form into glorious form as the miracle of her evolution brings us surprise after surprise.

The Empress rules benevolently from a throne of daisies. All around her vernal energies spiral outward, searching for wholeness, in the continuous generation and regeneration of life. She basks in the light of the sun and from it she receives the twelve-orbed crown representing her initial insemination from the extraterrestrial source of life. Through her skin we see the mad miracle of life evolving inside her motherbody; abstract honeybees planned by the Priestess gather pollen from the daisies heavy with the information they will need in order to navigate the complexity of nature. When ready to be born and assume its role in the grand plan, the honeybee bursts from the imperial heart, carrying the vital information along with tidings of love. In celebration, the meadow erupts in a glory of daisies flowering the path of the most recent arrival.

In the Tarot the Empress is most clearly linked to the Emperor. He symbolizes the organizing principle of linearity and time that bring order to the chaotic jumble of her eternal garden. The Empress and the Emperor have equal status to remind us of the balance between the linear and the cyclic.

Divinatory Meaning

Should the Empress grace your reading, be conscious of the life force creeping and flowing all around and in you. She is the strongest mother archetype in the Tarot. Regardless of your gender, you manifest her universal life force when you create, when you give birth to projects, when you take the ephemeral and make it flesh. What is your relationship with your mother like: How do you play mother? "Empressing" means nurturing and mothering yourself and others. Take care to see that your children and/or your ideas make their way in the world. Use her high aesthetic standards as your guide. But beware, sometimes the Empress may influence you in a way that requires some tempering. Although she loves you boundlessly, the Empress loves her entire garden boundlessly - even the weeds.