III. The Empress
An ongoing study of the Tarot
Whereas the II. High Priestess is the keeper of the mysteries, the divine interpreter guarding the gateway, the III. Empress is the garden you enter having passed through the gateway. She is the daughter of Heaven and Earth, the Virgin become Earth Mother multiplier, fertility and fecundity, the vivifying principle, the subconscious seed turned vast material wealth. A symbol of Venus, the ripening wheat, the river and the waterfall, this earthly paradise as the house of Man. “Desire and the wings thereof.” She represents all goddesses, particularly those of fertility and motherhood.
She is the impossibility of summarizing all the symbols of Woman, “that she continually recurs in an infinitely varied form: many throned, many minded, many wiled daughter of Zeus.” Her crown is the firmament of the Zodiak.
Inversely, or ill-dignified, she is the goddess of death, of war and famine, of abortion on demand at any time for any reason, sexualizing, sterilizing and mutilating children in the name of therapy and progress, destroyer of all things familial, cry a river of tears for climate while the world becomes ever more polluted, Human Resources harridan firing you for improper use of pronouns, Liberal blue hair wailing to save an illiterate, violent illegal immigrant from being deported.
In all of this, she is Nature, in it’s phenomenal aspect, ever destroying, ever renewing, ever creating. In this she is the absolute and necessary complement of Order, of IV. The Emperor. She is divine chaos to his divine order, in perfect balance. When she is in balance with the Emperor, she is the archetypal, Eternal Nurturing Mother. When the Emperor falters, she becomes the death goddess. When men are weak, women become all-consuming.
The most emblematic in the Western tradition, of this Empress, is Queen Elizabeth. She was called The Virgin Queen but that was not truly accurate, as she presided over the flourishing/fertility/fecundity of England.
Leading the near total degradation of England now are two feminized “Emperors” without a proper complement.
And this passes for the masculine compliment to feminized Labour in the UK, the leader of the Tory’s, Kemi Badenoch.
In Russia, one of their greatest leaders in the Empress tradition was Catherine the Great.
Compared to the feminized leadership without masculine complement in the UK, Putin is like a (technocratic) Emperor, complement to Mother Russia, still a bit globohomo but not quite as degraded as the UK (maybe).
Compared to Peter the Great, who consolidated Mother Russia, modernized it and made it a truly great nation.
In Germany, which is currently another flashpoint in the degradation of Europe, Maria Theresa was essentially a Holy Roman Empress
Compared to the liberal Girl Boss Extraordinaire, allowing, facilitating and demanding a Muslim invasion, and the de-industrialization of Deutschland. Angela Merkel aka Frau Dopey Face.
While an Empress turned Goddess of Death still presides over the EU and the decline and death of Europe.
And of course, our might-have-been empress, goddess of death, if the deep state had thought to stir up a pandemic as cover to steal an election in 2016….
Notice in the two above images, the same globe and cross that the glorified man-child, King Charles held in his left hand, and in the paintings of Catherine the Great and Maria Theresa.
L’Imperatrice of the Knapp-Hall deck I use, is my favorite Empress card. Here she is winged, and so, divine. She has the firmament of the planets of the zodiak for a crown. She holds down the crescent moon with her foot, a symbol of her mastery over the unconscious. In her right hand she holds an Eagle; for America, the very symbol of our empire. She is backed by the Sun, in the Cabala the symbol of masculine Chokmah, pure masculine Force, which she, Binah, divine Feminine, translates into all Form. The shield is said to be the root of multiplicity and unity, as above, so below.