The Empress - Tarot - Major Arcana

In this episode, we continue the Fool's Journey and arrive at Card III — The Empress. After the Magician's focused will and the High Priestess's interior silence, the Empress bursts into full bloom: abundance, embodiment, and creative life. We explore why she is so often underestimated, what it truly means to live in a body on this Earth, and why the spiritual life cannot happen anywhere else. This episode is an invitation to honor what is growing in you — and to remember that the body is not a distraction from the sacred. It is where the sacred lives.

Timestamped Show Notes:

• 0:00 — Introduction: Welcoming The Empress, card three of the Major Arcana
• Meet the Empress (2:57) — A vivid description of the card: her throne, the wheat fields, the waterfall, the 12-star crown
• The Power of Three (7:00) — Why the Empress follows the Magician and High Priestess; what it means to be the creative third
• The Empress and the Body (10:28) — The Empress as the card of embodiment; a counter-argument to spiritualities that ask us to escape the body
• The Empress in Everyday Life (13:43) — Recognizing the Empress in the friend whose home feels like a sanctuary, the gardener, the new parent
• The Shadow Side (16:43) — Smothering and over-giving; the Empress who cannot receive
• Personal Reflection (19:50) — A personal admission: what it means to live too much in the head and not enough in the body
• When the Empress Shows Up in a Reading (25:09) — Four meanings: creative gestation, returning to the body, nurturing relationships, learning to receive
• Closing Invitation (27:57) — One image, one question, one embodied act to do this week

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello! We have been walking through the early cards of tarot together, and we started at the cliff with the fool, we started with the fool's journey, and then we moved to the magician at his table with the four tools laid out, and then we went to the temple of the high priestess, where she sat between the two pillars. Well, today we walk out of the temple and into the garden. The card we are meeting today is the Empress. She is card three. And after the High Priestess's stillness, the Empress is, well, there's no other way to say it, she's a lot. She is a lot of color, a lot of life, a lot of fruit, flowers, water, warmth. If the high priestess is the moon at midnight, the empress is the afternoon sun pouring in through every single window. Now, I want to say something at the top of this one because I think it really matters, and I tend to do that a lot with almost probably, I'll probably do it with every card, and that's because there's always another message to it. And the Empress is in a lot of contemporary spiritual circles, probably the most casually dismissed card in the early sequence. People love the fool. He's romantic, he's fresh. They love the magician because he's powerful, and they love the high priestess because, well, she's mysterious. The Empress, they tend to glance over. They think, well, that's the mother card, that's the fertility card, that's the abundance card. Okay, we got it, let's move on. And I think this is a very serious mistake in any reading. Because the Empress is, in many ways, the card that holds the rest of them up. She is the one who reminds us that none of this is happening anywhere except in the body, on this earth, in time, in matter, in the actual material world. And the fact that this is often dismissed is crazy to me. It is the gift that makes everything else possible. So let's just take a moment and just be in that present moment in our body, on this earth, in this time, in this matter, in this actual material world. So let's take a moment and picture the card. Picture this. The woman is seated, unlike the high priestess, she sits. But where the priestess sat upright between two pillars and a stone temple, the empress reclines on a throne in the middle of a wild, abundant landscape. Her throne is full of cushions, and those cushions are red and embroidered with the symbol of Venus. And she's comfortable. She is settled. The High Priestess sat with an alert stillness of a woman in meditation. The Empress sits with a relaxed stillness of a woman who has built a life and is enjoying it. And she wears this flowing robe pattern with pomegranates. And they're the same pomegranates that were embroidered on the veil in the High Priestess card. Except now they are not hidden. They are out in the open. They are a part of her clothing. The mystery that came with that card, in other words, now has come down into the world and become wearable. And she is often depicted as pregnant. In in some decks, she is unmistakably with child. And in others, that suggestion is a little gentler. But either way, the message is the same. She is generative. Something is growing in her. She is having something grow inside of her, in her world. Something is becoming. On her head now is a crown of twelve stars. Those twelve stars can represent the twelve months, the twelve signs, the twelve cycles. Basically, she wears time itself. And then in one hand, she holds a scepter topped with a globe. In some readings, this is the world she rules, and in others, it's the seed of a world about to be made. And both are right. Well, then around her, a field of golden wheat ripening. Behind her is a cypress forest. It's very dark, it's dark green, full of life, and it's very dense. And beside her, there's that small waterfall that pours down into a stream, showing that water, the source, is moving freely through her domain. She is not separate from the landscape. She's not seated on a way that the king would be seated in his land. It's his land. No, the Empress, she is a part of it. The wheat grows because she is there. The water flows because she is there. The forest is full of life because she is there. She is not the owner of the garden, she is the garden, looking out at itself with a face. She is that garden. And this is the image. It's a queen. Her throne, her wheat, her water, her stars, her scepter, her impending child. The whole world holding together because she is in the middle of it. Perfectly comfortable. So the high priestess was two, and the empress is three. There's always going to be a weight to the move from one number to the next, and that's the same with two to three. And it's worth paying attention to, because it's one of the more consequential numeric moves in the whole deck. Two is it is the discovery of the other. Two is that moment one realizes they are not alone. Two is that tension, that polarity. But two is not yet creative. Two by itself just kind of hums. Three is what happens when two come together and make something new. Three is the child of the pair. Three is that creative outcome of the encounter. It's the moment when two halves stop just being two halves and become something neither of them could have been alone. This is why the Empress comes here. After the magician and the high priestess, the magician was action, the high priestess was reception. Each of them alone is incomplete. The magician without the high priestess becomes high performance. The high priestess without the magician becomes endless waiting. But when those two energies meet, when the doing and the listening, the speaking and the silence, it all comes together, something is born. And the empress is that something. She is the creative third. She is what shows up when the first two have done their work. And I think this is one of the most useful frameworks that Tarot offers. Because most of us, when we are stuck on either the magician's side or the high priestess's side, we are pushing too hard or we are receiving too long. We are overacting, or we are overwaiting. The frustration we feel is not a sign that we are not that we are doing it wrong, it is a natural condition of one without two. The Empress is what we are reaching for. The fruitful integration. The thing that finally gets born because we have learned to do both at once. A project, a creation, even having a hard conversation, or even many years of inner work, and felt that quiet, settled satisfaction afterward. That is the Empress. The product is one thing. The inner sense of I made this, I let this happen, I held space for this to come through. That's the Empress's gift. She is what flow feels like when it has actually produced something. The Empress is the card of the body. And I want to spend uh just a little bit of time here because this is where she lands hardest in our particular cultural moment. Most of us have somewhere in our religious or spiritual upbringing picked up the idea that the body is a problem. That the body is what we are trying to get past. That the real work is happening elsewhere. Up in the head or out in the spirit or in the disembodied realm of pure ideas. Well, the body in this framing is the thing that distracts you from the spiritual life. It eats too much, it gets tired, it wants things, it complicates your meditation, it will eventually die. The Empress is the card that walks into the whole framing and says, You have got this exactly backwards. The body's not the problem. The body is the first place the spiritual life happens. The body is the only place it happens, in fact. Every prayer you have ever prayed, you prayed with a body. Every moment of genuine spiritual experience you've had, you had it through a nervous system. Every act of love, of generosity, of forgiveness, of courage, there was a body in it, doing it. You cannot have a spiritual life without one. The Empress knows this. She knows it down to her bones, which is appropriate because bones are her domain too. She is the card that really tells us to eat the food. Hug that person, take the walk, plant the garden, make the meal, do the laundry, notice the weather. All of these are spiritual acts when done with attention. None of them are beneath your spiritual life, they are your spiritual life. And this is, by the way, why I am suspicious of any spirituality that requires you to escape your body to practice it. If your tradition is asking you to leave behind the meal, the touch, the laundry, the body itself, you might want to take a good hard look at what it's actually asking. The Empress would send you back to the kitchen and tell you to cook something. Then come tell me about your enlightenment. The deepest spiritual traditions that I've studied across different cultures all eventually circle back to that same point. The body is the temple. The body is the altar. The body is where the work happens. Anything that pretends otherwise is a phase you will eventually have to grow out of. And when you think of the people you already know, you have met the Empress. You absolutely have. She is the friend whose home you walk into and immediately feel that someone has loved this place. Something is simmering on the stove, there are flowers, and the light is good because that friend has paid attention to bringing in sunlight. And there is room on the couch for you to sit. There is room in the house for you to be anywhere and to feel at home. You of you may arrive a little tense, but you know by the time you are comfortable, like within a couple minutes, you feel at home. Or she is the gardener, because when you think of the empress, you also think of the gardener, the person who plants tomatoes in May and is somehow eating them in August. As if this is not some daily miracle that it actually is. She made those happen. She nurtured them. Or she's that new parent. In the second or third month, when the shock has finally worn off and that love has really set in. When she's sitting on the couch with that sleeping baby on her chest, looking out the window, completely still. And in that moment, she is more powerful than any king who has ever lived. She is the body that finally relaxed. The breath that finally landed. The shoulder you let down after carrying it up for up to your here for forty years. Finally relaxed it. She is that pleasure in being touched without any agenda. The pleasure. And that pleasure is one that we don't often talk about. Because that pleasure comes because we are human. We are creatures. We are an animal. We have needs. We need warmth. We need food to eat. We need a place to sleep. And we need to be held. The Empress is all of that woven together. She is that embodied life. And every card has a shadow. And the Empress's is worth naming carefully. Because her shadow is one of the more confusing ones. The magician's shadow is all performance and no channel. Or the high priestesses was all knowing and no-doing. The Empress's shadow is more relational. It shows up in would say two ways. The first is smothering. The mother who gives so much that the receiver is no longer allowed to be a separate person. Or that friend that nurtures you so completely that you are not, in the end, allowed to grow into your own life. The Empress at her shadow turns generative care into a slow, well-meaning suffocation. The wheat fields may be abundant, yeah, but the people inside them are not allowed to leave the field. And the second is over-identified with her own giving. She has built her whole identity around being the one who provides. And so she cannot and will not let someone else do it for her. She does not know how to receive. She does not know how to need anything. She gives and gives and burns out on the inside and resents it and then gives more. Because the alternate would mean admitting she is not, in fact, an inexhaustible source. Both of these shadows come from the same root, forgetting that the Empress too is part of that cycle. She's not a one-way fountain pouring outward forever. She gives because she has received. She nurtures because she has been nurtured. Her abundance is real, but it is not infinite. It is replenished by rest, by silence, by her own willingness to be cared for sometimes. If you are someone who gives a lot, and many of you listening are, that shadow side of the empress is the version of yourself you have to watch. Not because giving is wrong, giving is beautiful, but because the moment your giving starts coming from depletion rather than abundance, you've stopped being the empress and become a wonderful, exhausted imposter of her. The mature empress receives as fluently as she gives. That is the whole secret. Both directions equally honored. And I told you I told you with the fool that I am still hesitating at edges I can't fully name. And I told you with the magician that I tried to be him with without first being the fool. And I told you with the high priestess that she's the card I have been least willing to admit I needed. The Empress for me is a different kind of admission. Because I'll be honest with you, much of my life has been spent in my head. In language and ideas and meaning, I read, I write, I teach, I think about traditions and frameworks and patterns and what it all means. There is a real love in that work that I have, and I'm not apologizing for it. But the truth is that the magician and the high priestess in me have always had a much louder vote than the Empress. The body. The pleasure of just being a creature. These physical body of mine has not always been my home. I have been a person who is all who was always trying to figure something out. Always trying to put one more thing into language. I was always trying to make sense of that next layer. It is part of how I serve. But the Empress in me has been somewhat starved. What I'm beginning to learn and what I want to say is that none of the work I do means anything if I'm not also doing it in the body. That writing is hollow. If the writer is not also taking walks. The teaching is brittle if the teacher is not always sleeping. The spiritual life I am pointing other people toward will not, in the long run, be available to me unless I let myself be what the Empress is asking me to be. And that's a creature in my body at this time on this actual earth in this material realm. The leaps that I have told you about, the ones I'm still hesitating to take, the ones that feel very uncertain, I am starting to suspect that part of what is holding me back is actually it's not the fool. It's an empress problem. I have not yet given my body enough trust to carry me through what is coming. And I have not yet let myself rest enough to leap. I'm always go, go, go. I have been trying to do all of this on the strength of the magician's will and the intuition of the high priestess. And I've been forgetting that the empress is the one who actually helps bring it all together. You don't will a child into existence. You make space for it, and that's exactly what the Empress does. She nurtures it. She makes space for that child. She feeds it. She lets it grow at its own pace. She honors that the new thing is being woven inside while also doing other things. While going to bed, while sitting out in the sun, while cooking dinner, while in just taking that moment for herself. I am trying to learn this. And a lot of us, I'm an absolute beginner at it. But the Empress is teaching me that becoming who I am will require me to be more in my body and not less. And again, if you are someone like me who has spent a lot of your life in your head, if you have a rich inner world in a slightly neglected outer one, or if you are very good at thought and a little awkward in the flesh, the Empress might be the card calling to you. She's not asking you to give up the inner life. She's asking you to let it land somewhere. In the body, in the only place any of us have ever actually been able to live. So when the Empress shows up in a reading, she's usually saying a few things. She shows up when a creative project is just starting, in the stages of becoming. Sometimes you don't even know yet what is being made. There's just a sense of fullness, of something growing on the inside. Dempris is saying to trust that. And she shows up when you are out of your body and need to come back. Too much time in your head or on your phone, in thought. Dempress is that gentle redirection. She's the one that tells you to take a walk. Eat something. Hug someone close to you. Go outside. Lie on the floor. Take a nap. The work you are trying to do will not work until you come back down to your body. And she shows up when a relationship needs nurturing. A friendship that has been on autopilot. Well, the Empress reminds us that some of these things need a little bit more love and nurturing. They will not survive on just the past. And she shows up when you need to receive. This is one of the harder ones for a lot of people. And it's why I think it's something we need to really focus on. Sometimes the Empress is not asking you to give more. She's asking you to let someone give to you. She's asking you to be the one on the receiving end of the abundance for once. To perhaps let someone cook for you, to sit and be cared for, to stop being the source of everything. And sometimes in a reading, she shows up to remind you that you are allowed to just enjoy your life. This is more radical than it sounds. A lot of us are running spiritual programs that underneath treat enjoyment as suspicious. The Empress sits in her garden, looks at us with her calm mother of the world eyes, and just straight up basically tells us that the pleasure is real, the beauty is real. All of it's real. None of this is in the way of your spiritual life. This is your spiritual life. So I want to leave you, of course, with one image, one invitation. The image is the Empress on her throne. There's that wheat field around her, the water moving beside her, the forest behind her, the twelve-star crown on her head, and her body's relaxed. Her hand resting on the seed of the world. And the whole landscape arranging itself around her presence because she's the kind of presence that the landscape will always arrange itself around. I want you to picture her for a moment, and I want you to ask yourself, what is growing in you right now that you have not yet honored? What creative thing? What relational thing? What slow body level thing? What is being woven somewhere underneath all your doing that you have not been giving enough attention to? What is it? What's that creative thing? And the invitation is that sometime in the next week, do something for your body that you have been putting off. Just one thing. Perhaps it's making that doctor's appointment. Or let yourself sleep an extra hour. Take a long walk. Put your phone in the in another room and just let it be for a little while. Go to yoga class. Whatever it is, do it not as a productivity hack. Not as like the self-care that you will later post about. Do it as a quiet act of devotion to the Empress in you. Do it as like a recognition that the body is real and that the world is real. Just do this. And you may feel a small relief. And if you do it regularly, you will start to notice that the rest of your life, the work that you've been doing, the spiritual practices, the relationships, they all get better. Because it is being held finally by a body that you have remembered to feed. The Empress has been waiting in the garden. She's been waiting this whole time. It's time to listen to her. To embrace her. Just be that creature. And let that garden be the journey.