The Empress
Femininity, beauty, nature, nurturing, abundance, creative block, dependence on others.
The Empress Connection to Femininity
The Empress is a beautiful woman with blonde hair and a peaceful aura about her. On her head, she wears a crown of twelve stars, showing her connection with the mystical realm and the cycles of the natural world (the twelve months of the year and the twelve planets). The Empress has a strong connection with Mother Earth and life itself.
The Empress signifies a strong connection with our femininity. Femininity translates in many ways – elegance, sensuality, fertility, creative expression, nurturing – and is necessary for creating balance in both men and women. The Empress calls on you to connect with your feminine energy. Create beauty in your life. Connect with your senses through taste, touch, sound, smell and sight. Draw on these senses to experience pleasure and deep fulfillment. Treat yourself to a day spa, learn massage, enjoy a fine restaurant or spend more time with your partner. Discover different approaches to expressing yourself creatively, be it through painting, music, drama or other art forms. This may be the perfect chance to take up a new hobby that enables you to access this part of yourself.
Abundance Surrounds You
The Empress signifies abundance. You are surrounded by life’s pleasures and luxuries and have everything you need to live a comfortable lifestyle. You are in a period of growth, in which all you have dreamed of is now coming to fruition. When The Empress appears in your Tarot readings, take a moment to reflect on the abundance that surrounds you and offer gratitude for all you have created so you can continue to build on this energy and create even more abundance in your life.
>> Related Reading: Finding Gratitude in Difficult Times
Connecting to a Higher Plane
As the Mother Earth archetype, The Empress urges you to venture out into nature to ground your energy and be in flow with the earth. Take a trip to your favorite natural setting, be it a forest, beach, mountain, or lake, and sit for a couple of minutes, hours or even days to breathe in the energy that surrounds you while marveling in the beauty of your surroundings. Allow yourself the time and the space to enter a different frame of mind and receive the grounding spirit of nature into your heart and consciousness. When you do this, you can reach higher planes of consciousness.
Giving in to Your Nurturing Side
When you are in tune with the energy of The Empress, you will naturally take on her mothering nature. You feel a strong urge to nurture and care for others, from a place of loving compassion and support. You see it as a gift and an honor to tend to others, and in doing so you, too, receive benefit. In a more literal sense, you may step into the role of ‘mother’, perhaps as the mother of a newborn, caretaker of other people’s children, or spending more quality time with your kids.
The Empress can also suggest pregnancy or birth. This may be an actual pregnancy or childbirth, or a metaphorical ‘birth’ of a new idea or project. Bring your creative ideas into being by nurturing them and supporting their growth. Allow those designs and their manifestation to flow through you, acting with compassion and love.
If you do not connect with the first part of this reading look below and see if this is going on in your life.
- Over-mothering can apply to people on equal footing, too. An overly “caring” roommate, a stranger who inappropriately comments on your clothes or food choices — all of these can relate to the Empress reversed. Co-dependency and enabling are also related behaviors.
- Reversed tarot cards can have meanings that are at both ends of the scale. In the Empress reverse’s case, just as you can have smothering, you can also have neglect and even bullying. This aspect of the reversed card is not kind and not caring, and instead of providing comfort, it wants to take comfort away or simply does not care if you are comfortable.
- On a less traumatic note, the Empress reversed can be about blocked creativity. (That sounds like a relief after all the other possible meanings. “Oh, writer’s block? That is all?”) In this case, look at how your comfort level with the project, or even your physical comfort including the cleanliness of your workspace and the surrounding environmental issues, all affect how you produce creative content.
The Empress Reversed
If you have trouble remembering what the Empress reversed means, look at that crown of stars. When the card is upside-down, the stars look like they are falling. Something has gone off with the growing, flowing love of the Empress. The Empress reversed is a sign to pay attention to. But, like all signs from the tarot, it is not a sure signal that everything will go wrong. You will find you have plenty of solutions to choose from now that you have gotten that head’s up.
Warmly,
Kellysaltair