The Emperor
An ongoing study of the Tarot
Since the Enlightenment and the time of Napoleon, we in the West have been trained to see the idea of an Emperor as something inherently negative. Liberalization over- threw traditional Western monarchies all throughout the 18-20th centuries. As condition of surrender of the Japanese in WWII, the West required Emperor Hirohito to renounce his divinity, making the Emperor of Japan a figurehead. In China the tradition of the Emperor was ended by that wicked step-child of the West, Communism. Napoleon has been mocked endlessly by Hollywood. Caesar is thought if not often said by many to have deserved what he got from the Senate.
The “progress” and pathology of this “liberalization” can be clearly seen now, how delusional and violent the Left is becoming, with Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). It has become an Iron Rule, whatever the left accuses of Trump and MAGA, they’ve already done or intend to do. They call Trump a dictator but they have acted like quasi marxist, petty dictators en masse, as a collective for years. Mostly affluent whites but increasingly, with NGO, DEI, global citizen types of all races. It is an expanding chaos all throughout the West they are facilitating. They have been facilitating an invasion, a quite literal Great Replacement, and they continue to do that in most of Europe.
Meanwhile a possible AI control grid descends, taking up ever more resources (especially water and electricity), with ever more reach into every aspect of our lives. Another grave existential threat. Oh, yes, and spraying mRNA on agricultural fields?
Who needs an Emperor to bring order out of chaos?
In the Tarot too, in modern times, particularly cards associated with feminism, the New Age or indigenous, have demonized or eliminated the Emperor, traditionally the fourth card in the Tarot. The Motherpeace Tarot has him as “without having developed a sense of community responsibility and respect for the earth….This is the energy of the four year old who wants to own the world and shouts “mine!”
Alexander the Great reduced to a petulant four year old.
Much of this based on the erroneous and unprovable notion that the world before the Macedonians and Greeks was some kind of peaceful, matriarchal eco-paradise1, the so-called culture of the Mother is said to be all magnanimous and good, while the culture of the Father is inherently negative.
A symbol of Patriarchy in its active form, representing the King, the patriarch, the boss. Sometimes a glyph of fatherhood, he is always an authority figure seeking to establish control and dominance…Whereas once the Great Mother had ruled magnanimously over all her children, now the Father God came on the scene to oppress women and nature with the doctrine of male supremacy…if fatherhood is to have meaning, then “promiscuous” or untamed female sexuality must be eliminated and the institution of monogamous marriage enforced by law.
I would quote more, but it only gets more bonkers: Alexander burned all the great “matriarchal” libraries, the fundamental relationship between men and women became rape, the hero’s journey is just a sordid tale of masculine toxicity.
This is called making up history and then believing it. but one does not simply wish away or cancel an archetype.
In case you were wondering how so many liberal women have come to see all (white) men not emasculated as toxic, of history as one long train of oppression, and all of history as better wiped from the collective mind so we can live in matriarchal suffocating longhouse paradise again, changing the narrative in the moment however the matriarchal, managerial, bureaucratic State sees fit. Or how so many of them have come to accept, as they believe themselves to be the best of humanity at the leading edge of evolution, a man who “becomes” a woman is therefor inherently good and allowed to “colonize” women’s spaces. That and 20mil illegal immigrants crossing the border, 90% of which are military aged males, a rather high percentage of them quite violent, coming from “patriarchal” societies, all transformed in the AWFL mind, into oppressed women and children yearning to be free. Bonkers.
It is all a fundamental misunderstanding of masculine and feminine in the esoteric, eternal sense, and it has had grave implications, bringing the West to the brink of collapse, and much of modernity with it.
The Traditional Emperor Card
The Emperor in the esoteric tradition is the one who brings order to the world. Out of primal chaos, order is established. He is the companion, the correlate to the Empress, who is form, while he is force. His energy is pure force, but he cannot bring order to the world but through the feminine. In the Cabala he is like Chokmah, pure force, channeled through Binah, supernal feminine, who gives that force form.
The Emperor in this sense is an archetype. The Emperor is not past practice, it is the Ideal.
As the emperor, he embodies virile power, authority and self-mastery. He is four-square stable. He does not bring war, he brings peace out of the ever-war of opposing warlords. He is the Shogun of Japan who consolidates power so that samurai are no longer constantly at war, fighting for their liege lord against other liege lords.
With the Empress, the Emperor brings stability, that she might bring fertility to the new empire.
He is the coherent ruling principle without which all collapses and decays. In religious symbolic terms he is the expression of peaceful, universal order, of the New Jerusalem, Avalon or the Garden of Hesperides. He is the four elements, the four seasons, the four cardinal points, the four cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance), the four letters of the Tetragrammaton, the holy name of God. He is the Great Law.
In the absence of this energy Crowley said, “whereas when tamed and made to lie down in green pastures, nothing is left but the docile, cowardly, gregarious and succulent beast. This is the theory of government.” (my italics)
In the absence of that strong center, you are instead ruled by a mass of diffuse authoritarian midwits.
Businessmen, lawyers, doctors, bureaucrats, journalists and academics – these are the sacred cows of Our Democracy, because they all hail from the urbanite upper middle class. Western liberal democracies have become enslaved to this singular socioeconomic group, and uncontroversial establishment politics are little more than a reflection of what this group prefers. The dominance of these types is neither inevitable nor an accident. They are at most 10% of the population, and they owe their prominence to the peculiarities of democratic institutions. Efforts to break their power will inevitably be decried as antidemocratic, because this class self-identifies with democracy and they control all establishment discourse. These kinds of people love to talk about Our Democracy, but what they really mean when they say this is that it is their democracy and not yours.
When the Emperor is ill-dignified, then he is just a warlord, or a petty tyrant, or a father prone to unaccountable violent outbursts. When the Emperor is not balanced by the Empress, when Aries is not balanced by Venus, then he is voracious, he is violent for the sake of violence, he is purely destructive. She becomes chaos without his counter-balance, he becomes chaos without her counter-balance. This is the universal Law of polarity.
That is how so many liberal women have it so very wrong about men. You do not strengthen men by emasculating them, you do not make men less violent by demonizing them, it is quite the opposite. Conservative women with children consistently poll as the happiest people in America precisely because they have something like balance with their husbands. Liberal women consistently poll as the least happy people in America precisely because many have little idea how to achieve polarity with a man (or in themselves), instead coming to demonize and try to dominate men in the very way they claim the “patriarchy” treats them.
Meanwhile, many men suffer, not having a woman to balance their worst impulses, while instinctually avoiding women incapable of being their counter-weight, who would dominate, weaken and emasculate them. There are a few men I have encountered on Substack, who have collapsed into hatred for all women, which is Emperor energy in shadow metastasizing. Too many men have willingly allowed themselves to be emasculated, which is an equally toxic response to feminism, as is hating all women.
The sword is a symbol of masculine potency. The Empress is often depicted in a fertile garden, while the Emperor is depicted in a stark, comparatively barren place. For men that is a symbol of the starkness of the male mind, the spirit purified by self-control, Will-power dynamic and outgoing. With the sword The Emperor cuts through all that is false, he brings order out of chaos.
An Empire or a Republic?
Perhaps…our challenge is taking the best and leaving the rest.
Restore the Republic.
Expel the barbarians.
Before that she said I was a typical ignorant male. I was probably too harsh. The Emperor does not suffer fools. I don’t mean to suggest I am some sort of Monarch, I’m saying any man might embody the power and virtue of the Emperor. Any citizen for sure, has a duty to embody something of the emperor, in this seat of the American Empire/civilization, if we want to sustain it.
A strong emperor is like a beacon, to focus the attention of the empire. How existential is the threat?
That’s the stakes in the WH40K universe. Every slip in vigilance risks a daemonic incursion, and every daemonic incursion risks omnicidal annihilation. In WH40K, heresy does not merely threaten social order. It threatens reality itself.
In such a universe, the Imperium does what it does because the alternative is annihilation. It enforces religious orthodoxy not because it seeks to control thought for its own sake, but because disbelief in the Emperor opens the door to dangerous cults, heresies, and Chaos worship….
The Imperium’s cruelty is neither gratuitous or unnecessary; it is instrumental and inevitable. The Imperium’s agents don’t operate from the belief that all men must be crushed for the Emperor’s glory, but from the objective knowledge that without unity and obedience, there will be no humanity to save.
That is an extreme, sci-fi, gamer interpretation of the importance of the Emperor, like mythology, a good example of an emperor in fictional circumstances, true in the main, rhyming at the very least. Has a certain ring to it. Horrifying from our perspective in this materialist, liberal society, but vigorous at least, in a way modernity is most definitely not. A vigor a lot of men are yearning for.
The swords in the tarot are not generally positive cards, often indicative of a problem. But also a reminder how important, and what a great responsibility it is to take up the sword in defense of your way of life, in defense of the people and the place you love.
In fact I am more of a mind of Phisto, I would rather restore the Republic than support a Caesar, Emperor or King. If Rome is the prime-ultimate model, it is also a cautionary tale; for every Augustus you have several Nero/Caligulas. But I will support a Caesar, Emperor or King if the only alternative is the left in America instituting broad chaos and a real invasion (or AI turns into some sick control grid.)
Anyone who has been to a liberal city lately, can see the effect of what is called by some, anarcho-tyranny: not prosecuting criminals, incentivizing them to commit more crime; allowing homeless and gangs to run open-air drug and sex markets; mentally ill accosting people in the street; drug addled collapsed on sidewalks; streets a dumping ground for garbage. While you are preoccupied with the chaos, those who run the city loot the city, some new untouchable DEI kakistocracy.
Biden Admin flooded America with 20mil third world barbarians, many of them quite violent. Liberals mostly blame me and people like me, law abiding citizens paying taxes trying to live a decent life, for violence. That is when decent people start asking, what would an Emperor do, in defense of me and my fellow tax paying, law abiding citizens? As heretofore government has seemed increasingly hostile to me, while ever expanding, most of the last several decades.
Trump is an exception to that rule, I think. He is most definitely like a beacon, like a Caesar, a real President2, directing the focus and energy of the empire. I know some of my frens think he is facilitating a technofascist AI net, and is too in the bag of Israel, but at least I’m not having to worry about a continued invasion. Also, some things quite wounding to the liberal order and power structure have been done, so, he is my President. Keep up the good work, President Trump and Admin.
I don’t want Trump to be an emperor, but I want him to embody the power of an emperor. I want him to take control of the empire, and bring order out of chaos.
In Conclusion
Democracy is mostly a scam. It is divide and conquer near perfected. By the mid nineties America was well on its way to racial harmony, democrats back then arguing that there is no such thing as race, race is mostly a social fiction. Obama was supposed to be the great unifier, but then his first act giving the keys of the kingdom to the too big to fail banks, proved he was merely another cynical creature of capital. Now with the revelations from the FBI and CIA about the epic fraud that was Russiagate, a cynical, wicked plan to divide the country, by Obama and Hillary. Such a systemic and effective lie, nearly half the country continues to believe it with the visceral passion of zealotry.
After Trump won in 2016, democrats decided race is the most important thing, thereafter demonizing all things white, and filling the heads of minorities with endless grievance, putting all white males no matter how powerless in the category of oppressor, and all minorities and women including white women in the category of oppressed. Flooding the country with third world, democracy-illiterate migrants, meant to flip the script and make the oppressed the oppressors in all but name. The model for liberals being the one-party, banana republic-esque, near failed state of California.
Meanwhile, most of that time, Republicans have been content to be minority party kleptocrats, drunk on deficit spending and debt.
If the right is to hold back the tide of liberalization turning America into a boundary-less third world dystopia, the right should embody more the emperor and empress in polarity. “Conservative” men and women working together, with a Republican President like an imperial beacon. Not to go the way of the Caesars of Rome, but to restore something of the promise of America as a beacon of freedom and stability in the world. There is a rising tide of chaos in the West, it threatens to utterly swamp most of Europe, we cannot let that happen in America.
Four-square stable, bringing order out of chaos.
Not hoping for an emperor to save us, but rather recognizing, The Emperor is simply one card to model oneself after, an important archetype on the path of self-mastery, in the journey that is the Tarot.
John Michael Greer published a piece recently, on the history of the belief that antiquity before the Bronze Age was a matriarchal eco-paradise.
Most of the discussion of these concepts during that time has fitted neatly into the simplistic straitjacket mentioned above. On the one hand there are people who insist that, as a matter of historical fact, some, or most, or all societies before the dawn of recorded history were ruled by women, and that these matriarchies were overthrown by patriarchal invaders. On the other hand there are people who insist that there were no such prehistoric matriarchies. Around and around the debate has gone; since it’s all but impossible to know much of anything about the gender politics of societies that left no written records, there’s basically nothing to stop both sides from finding what they want to find in the equivocal traces turned up by archeologists.
This is where the perspectives offered by the history of ideas come in handy. Let’s set aside questions about prehistory for a moment, and ask some that are less trouble to resolve: where did this belief in ancient matriarchies come from? Who invented it, when and where did they do so, and what causes did they intend the concept to support?
Gore Vidal wrote that George Washington was chosen as our first President, by the founders, because he most resembled in his bearing a King. Not a few wanted him to stay on as president until he died, reassert the notion of the Monarch, but he declined and the eight year limit has become the standard.
It’s so refreshing to read interpretations of a tarot reader who values the traditional way vs the new ‘woke’ way. This is why I stick to the Marseilles deck :) and that’s crazy about how some modern decks make the emperor into a spoiled brat. What you say resonates…I got attacked online by a man who said my king making program was ‘toxic’. He was super indoctrinated w feminism.
“one does not simply wish away or cancel an archetype.”