The Empress - The Planet wants to Vibe with You

A Tarot offering for Taurus Season

Put your hand on your chest. Your heart beats, generously, lovingly, without you having to ask anything of it. That’s the Empress.

Photo by Robert Lukeman on Unsplash

She is the ground under your feet. The air in your lungs. She is that whole spectrum of light waves that your eyes perceive as GREEN and the melodic sweep of the song that sends your shoulders swaying.

On our planet, living in these bodies, there are more ways to encounter the Empress than there are stars in the sky. We need only be open to receiving her gifts:

• Beauty

• Sensuality

• Creativity

• Pleasure

• Nurturance

I have always connected the Empress with Taurus season (rather than the traditional Taurus+Hierophant pairing) because I live in the Northern Hemisphere and late spring, with its flowers and promise of summer bounty, seems to offer the perfect vantage point from which to ponder the Empress’s power. But—admittedly—her generosity cannot be confined by season: the twelve stars in her crown suggest her supremacy in all twelve astrological signs. Surrounded both by verdant summer trees and ripened autumn wheat, she spans the globe (IS the globe!) encompassing the whole spectrum of gestation and harvest in its perfect rolling spin.

Smith Rider Waite’s The Empress lounging in succulents.

Her orbed scepter wields the power of all nature-based deities. The pomegranates on her dress align her with the myths of Persephone, the grain at her feet with Demeter, but the symbol beneath her opulent, cushioned throne marks her primacy as an aspect of Venus (ruling planet of Taurus)—the goddess of love, connection, and sensuality.

There’s something markedly primordial about this energy—to me, it suggests a type of being-ness that precedes individuation or separation. We all emerged from the Empress’s womb—but this card suggests that, well, maybe we didn’t really emerge so much as unfold. We do not exist without Nature. And though we seem to walk and move independently of the Empress’s cradle, there’s still a force here on Earth that holds us. However imperfectly. She protects and provides for us. She encourages our evolution and, if we’re open, showers us in wonders.

Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash

When I receive this card in a reading, I feel I’m suddenly called into a mystical relationship with my surroundings. There are the old-world standards: Trees that listen. Birds that talk. But also the things that people have made: the laptop I’m typing on. The coffee in my cup. They all take on a kind of sentience that cracks my heart open a little bit. I find myself asking: what are we to each other?

Everything takes on a cosmic gleam.

When I can sustain this frame of mind, my senses are heightened. I feel the temperature of the air as it arches up the bridge of my nose more acutely. I’m drawn to feather the pages of a paperback between my hands, marveling that the pulp of a tree now sounds like a flutter of wings and emits that bookstore scent that always has me swooning.

Decadence! I want to sigh. The Empress is decadence! Not because she’s overindulgent or chasing beautiful diversions, but because she’s living fully within the gorgeous interplay of things as they are.

Photo by imsogabriel stock on Unsplash

Periodically, I try bringing this depth of awareness to a ‘mindful eating’ practice. Have you tried experimenting with this before? It’s the practice of taking luxuriant time to eat—savoring colors, textures, tastes of food, acknowledging the time and effort it took to grow, ship, and prepare it.

I’m not great at mindful eating. I only get through a bite or two before I’m overwhelmed with sensations (or sometimes boredom) and my mind, mercifully, distracts me with its banter. Separating me from the world as only it can.

The Empress comes around to soften the mind’s hard edges. She invites me to experience embodied life as an unending love affair with Creation. It’s a shame I shut her down so often and so quickly — but the truth is I have trouble trusting her. Nature’s lessons don’t always come in easy, I have learned. Her lifeblood is fueled by inevitable destruction and death. Like the Celtic Cailleach, she is Womb and Tomb.¹ I expend so much effort to avoid the grief, illness and discomfort of living in my time-bound body, that I forget to appreciate its ecstasies.

Or maybe I fear I don’t deserve them?

There’s a line between self-indulgence and self-nurturing that I often have difficulty navigating. Not because I’m plagued with so many destructive habits, but because I was raised to believe that pleasure must be earned. The message I received went something like this: “Only through blood, sweat, and tears might you make yourself deserving of {enter desired experience here}” As a result, I’m constantly weighing the value of my labor against the degree of enjoyment I’m allowed to receive.

The Empress, Chris Anne’s Light Seers Tarot

The energy of the Empress radically shifts this perspective, because she insists on the value of everything and all of us without exception. We are worthy of her sustaining gifts simply because we ARE.

Even in our worst moments, when we have to own up to terrible mistakes, the Empress will still bless us with sunshine on our shoulders, a cool breeze in our hair, a kaleidoscope of leaves overhead, offering us forgiveness and transformation. Through the portal of grief, she ushers us toward new pleasures, reminding us of our unending capacity for healing and love.

Appreciation and Restoration

Like me, you may think on the Empress and experience pangs of regret for the ways in which we have collectively and personally taken the Earth’s generous presence for granted. It’s easy to imagine the Empress a bit like Shel Silverstein’s Giving Tree, dolling out gift after gift to her human companion until she is nothing but an old stump. It’s a depressing story, worthy of its many parodies and critical retellings.² In this age of ecological crisis, most of us will want to shake that brat kid in the story and tell him that if he has to cut down every part of the tree, at least he could say thank you. Show a little gratitude. Maybe he’s gotten so used to the tree’s generosity that he’s learned to look past her? Maybe it’s easier to look past her than it is to admit, that without her he has nothing at all.

There are a million ways in which we’ve tried to cut the Earth down to a stump. There’s no taking the sting out of that.

Photo by Tarikul Raana on Unsplash

And, at the same time, the Empress is not just the tree; she’s the ground and the sun, the air and sky. She’s the house that the brat kid built and she’s the brat kid, too. The magic of the Empress, I think, is that she doesn’t arrive to reprimand us for receiving her—or even for transforming her as we have. She teaches us to accept her bounty and create within it, always keeping in mind, that our flourishing is her flourishing—and vice versa. We’re in relationship with this planet. The Empress invites us to imagine that relationship as a loving one.

Silverstein’s Giving Tree, too, wants only to share in the boy’s pleasure as he swings in the tree’s branches and eats her sweet apples. The Empress offers us so many opportunities to do the same—to delight in the material world and appreciate its magic. (In the Emperor we learn how to responsibly wield it.) For the span of this season, we’re called to be guided by the Empress’s loving presence—to revel in the gift that it is to be embodied on this Earth. To be Us. Collectively and as individuals. Not as we could be—but as we are. Because we are hers. Our Mother’s.

Connect with the Empress

Try this 3-card spread to awaken the immense power of the Empress in you:

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• CARD 1 — Where in my life am I ready to receive?

• CARD 2 — What is here for me to love?

• CARD 3 — How can I find more pleasure in my life as it currently is?

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1. Mara Freeman identifies the bi-fold nature of the Earth goddess, the Cailleach, as both Womb and Tomb in Grail Alchemy: Initiation in the Celtic Mystery Tradition.

2. I like this one by Topher Payne about the “The Tree that Set Healthy Boundaries.” https://www.topherpayne.com/giving-tree