This is a card of…

Nature

Birth

Fertility

Abundance

Excess

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”

-Henry David Thoreau

The Empress basks in the warm summer sunlight of her garden, and her garden is the entire natural world. This is Mother Nature in the most primal, pagan sense. She is fullness and fertility, a bountiful harvest and a stocked larder.

She is also utterly unregulated in her power. Sometimes the rainy season is short and we struggle to feed ourselves. Sometimes it comes too intensely with terrible storms and floods that wash away our homes, even our lives.

This card has a traditional association with pregnancy (and baby makes III), the figure is often portrayed in the late stages of pregnancy. In our Magician-as-conception, High-Priestess-as-gestation scenario, the Empress is the birth. This is the time when projects and plans make a rough transition into actual being. It could be a painter’s first gallery showing. It could be the first time an aspiring chef makes a meal for others rather than just herself. The Empress wants you to know that this process is almost never painless and smooth.

This is not the mystical conversion of inspiration to manifestation we see in Key I, this is the nitty-gritty work of getting the thing out there- finally! Birth is miraculous and inspiring but it is also loud, painful, messy, sweaty and dangerous. The Empress sits beside the person who endures this trial, and knows at the other side there are two births: the new life and the new creator transformed by the experience.

The Empress is also a reminder that we are organic earthy beings. We are part of the natural world, no matter how much we believe structure and technology separate us. And in our own natures there exists both the ability to nurture and provide as well as to destroy with reckless excess.

Advice:

Breathe… PUSH!

Understand you are part of an ecosystem, a living part of a living planet.

Go for a walk in the woods.

Warning:

Your mind cannot function well if your body is not cared for.

Don’t consume more than you need.