Tag: the Goddess

The Empress Tarot Card

 

empress

 

The Empress is, quite simply, the Earth Goddess.  She is feminine sensuality and creativity at its’ height.  Unlike the High Priestess she doesn’t sit rigidly on a throne but reclines casually on a chair that looks like it was made for making love.  Her legs are slightly spread and she is openly sexual.

When the archetype of the Empress is blowing through your life you will experience a powerful blast of the feminine and all of its’ creative energy.  For a woman this card may indicate a pregnancy or a desire for pregnancy. If already a mother it may show a refocusing on the nurturing, feminine side of parenting.  For a man, this may show a gently powerful, nurturing person entering his life. There can be a period of material comfort and emotional abundance as a result of this.  There may be an opening of the man’s gentler, kinder nature.

For either sex, this can indicate a period of immense creativity and fertility.  The wheat in the foreground hearkens back to Demeter, the Goddess of Earth, agriculture, and fertility.  This may represent a strong interest in gardening and growing and a need to reconnect with Mother Earth.

There is quite simply nothing negative about this card.  It’s a card of growth, creativity, sensuality, fertility and expansion.  We like it.

Reversed:  Blocked creativity and a lack of abundance.  In a woman it may represent complications around the issue of birth:  unwanted or complicated pregnancies, infertility, abortion. In a man it may represent a total rejection of his feminine, nurturing side and embracing the cold, male archetype or perhaps sterility or vasectomies.  In either sex it can indicate poor parenting and withdrawn, disinterested mothers or fathers. If real estate is involved it may indicate a poor choice that fails to enhance the spirits and lives of the buyers. A period of lack of financial resources may be at hand.

A few thoughts on this card beyond what I go in to in my book, “Just the Tarot.”

The United States is a society which was firmly rooted in puritanism.  The Empress runs smack up against those elements.

For one thing, she is openly, joyously sexual.  There is nothing hidden or coy about it. She is firmly and comfortably settled in her body and happy to be 100% of a woman.  We emerged from a tradition that viewed women as socially and intellectually inferior and viewed their bodies as – at the worst, unclean and unholy – and at the best as some sort of fleshly trap to make good christian men think evil, lustful thoughts.    The Empress looks those men straight in the eyes and says, “Go ahead and think all the lustful thoughts you want. In fact . . . what have you got?”

Another aspect of The Empress that goes against that puritan tradition is her wonderful sensuality.  She is all about comfort, leisure, hot baths, tenderness and just plain loving life right here on this beautiful Earth.  

The puritan tradition tells us that life is hard and that’s good.  The more we deny our own sensuality the holier and closer to god we become.  Think of the Shaker chair: upright, stiff, designed so that the person who is using it WON’T be comfortable because comfort might make us enjoy our bodies.

shaker

 

The Empress quite clearly says, “To hell with that!  You couldn’t even make love in that chair without it falling over.  Where’s my couch?”

Unfortunately, that’s still an ongoing battle in our national psyche.  There are still way too many people who think that taking a little time for themselves, enjoying their bodies and luxuriating in this beautiful world is wrong.   Incorporating The Empress into your life is about rejecting that puritan, workaholic, type A model and learning to self-nurture.  Relax, stroke, love.

The High Priestess

 

highpriestess

 

There is no other card in the deck that took a deeper dive into Hermetic imagery than this one.  The two columns represent Boaz and Jachin, said to have guarded the entry to King Solomon’s temple.  The TORA scroll represents the divine wisdom and secrets of Jewish Kabbalism. One imagines that the exact directions for this card came from Arthur Edward Waite, rather than the fertile imagination of Pamela Colman Smith, who painted it.

Leaving aside the rather glaring irony that women were not even ALLOWED in the inner sanctum of Solomon’s Temple (unclean creatures, doncha know?)  we can move right along and affirm that the Lady on the card is a lunar Goddess. The crescent moon at her feet is a common symbol of the lunar Goddess and is found even in Christianized versions of her such as the Virgin of Guadalupe’.

The real message in the imagery of this card, though, is about balance between opposites and the center point where intuition reigns.  The cross on her chest is the solar cross rather than the Christian cross, its’ four arms all of exact equal length from its’ center. She sits exactly between the white and black opposites of the columns.  The crown she wears is a solar disk surrounded by crescent moons, emphasizing the opposites of night and day.

By now most of us are familiar with the left brain/right brain dichotomy.  While not absolute, the left brain tends to be more involved in so-called rational, logical thinking, while the right brain tends to be more involved with imagery, emotion, and artistic endeavors.  Mysteries, omens, subconscious patterns tend to percolate and grow in the right brain. At a certain point they may cross over into the left brain and become a conscious realization. That phenomenon is often described as the, “Ah, ha!” moment when something which was previously puzzling and odd suddenly makes sense.  It’s also described as intuition and intuition is what the High Priestess is all about.

When the High Priestess appears in your reading it means that it’s time to start paying very careful attention to your intuition and subconscious.  Answers to problems which have been bothering or blocking you can be found in dreams, sudden insights, or hunches. This card points out the need to trust your deep Self.  Listen to your inner voices. If you’re having trouble hearing them then take the time you need to meditate or go sit by yourself in isolation. Let the answers bubble up from your subconscious and trust those answers.

If the card applies to a person in the questioners life it may be a very intuitive, mysterious, but fairly asexual person.

Reversed:  The questioner isn’t paying attention to his or her intuitive nature.  This is a card of being out of touch with your inner Self. The pomegranates on the tapestry in this card hearken back to the myth of Persephone, a Goddess of crops and Spring who was kidnapped by Hades, dragged into hell, and then forced to live there half the year because she had eaten a single pomegranate seed.  It was a myth which was meant to explain the changing of the seasons: when she was living in hell the world turned into winter and the crops died.

It can have a deeper meaning with the reversed presence of this card.  The creative, intuitive, feminine right side of the brain is being overpowered and held hostage by the logical, sequential, male left side of the brain.  Intuition and creativity are being ignored in favor of so-called rational thinking. There is a need here to reconnect with your primal self. Take the time for meditating, long hot baths, dancing, art.  Get back in touch with your creative energy.

Just as an interesting side note it’s been absolutely fascinating watching the rise of the new women’s movement in the United States.  Starting with the massive march on Washington, D.C. right after Trump’s inauguration and running through today’s Me Too movement, we’re seeing a massive awakening of Right Brain perception in the United States.  The Divine Feminine is asserting itself and the Goddess is alive and well.  No doubt the High Priestess is hiding a smile.