The History of the Empress Card
msesheta
The History of the
Empress Card
Compared with many of the other cards of the tarot,
the Empress has had a rather uneventful five
centuries.
Waite and the other occultists are responsible for the
starry crown, the emblem of Venus, the waterfall, and
the vegetation and wildlife. In the historical decks
the Empress sits on a throne, almost always holding a
shield or orb in one hand and a sceptre in the other.
The shield typically bears and eagle as the heraldic
emblem of the Holy Roman Empire.
Occasionally, the Empress is depicted with wings, like
an angel. This can be traced to woodcarvings
misunderstanding and miscopying the strangely-shaped
throne on which the Empress sits in the Tarot de
Marseille pattern. The throne rises up on either side,
giving the appearance of wings rising from her back. A
similar transformation often occurred with Justice,
who sits on a similar throne.
In the Minchiate of Florence, the Empress transformed
into a quasi-male figure, dubbed "the Grand Duke" in
reference to the city's ruler. This was also probably
the result of ambiguity in interpreting the simple
woodblock designs, coupled with a pressure to make the
"rulers" (Papess, Empress, Emperor, and Pope) more
palatable to church authorities (the Minchiate
transformed the Pope into a second Emperor and dropped
the Papess entirely). Even after the card had been
called "the Grand Duke" for centuries, it still
retained some distinctly feminine features.
The most direct interpretation of the Empress card is
that it simply depicts the Emperor's consort. As
mentioned in my posting on the history of the High
Priestess card, there was a tradition of using
feminine figures as allegories for institutions, so in
this sense a woman in imperial regalia can stand for
the Empire itself. However, if this were the dominant
association for the card, one might expect it to
sometimes be called "The Empire", which it never was.
The presence of the Papess in the deck might cause us
to modify our interpretation of the Empress, however.
Although Gertrude Moakley suggests that the Papess may
indeed have been regarded as "the pope's wife", this
seems quite odd. Popes obviously did not marry, and
I'm not even aware of any stories or legends about
pope's wives. Furthermore, the tarot Papess actually
wears the sacred trappings of the office, such as the
triple crown, which unambiguously makes her a pope. So
against this backdrop, we probably ought to view the
Empress not as the Emperor's wife, but as an actual
ruler, the female Emperor.
This line of thought makes her a symbol of matriarchy,
defiantly finding expression in the thoroughly
patriarchal culture of Europe as it emerged from the
Middle Ages. Female rulers were not entirely unknown
of course, but the powers-that-be tolerated a woman
being crowned as monarch only as a last resort. The
Holy Roman Empire never had a female ruler, nor did
any of the northern Italian city-states that existed
when the tarot was first created. Naples and Sicily,
however, were both ruled by reigning queens in the
14th century.
There is an inevitable parallelism between political
authority structures and the authority structures
embedded in the institution of the family, especially
in previous centuries. Thus Empress and Emperor are
Mother and Father, transposed from rulership of the
household to rulership of the world. Traditionally,
the power of the Father is the power of law and
punishment, whereas the power of the Mother is the
power of nurturing and love. The Father enforces
distinctions, the Mother harmonizes and unifies.
Although there is nothing superficially subversive in
the image of the Empress, taken in isolation, her
inclusion in the quaternity of rulers and her
juxtaposition with the Papess suggests the possibility
that she is a wordless manifesto for activating the
power of the Mother in the governance of the world.
The designers of the tarot would not have used that
terminology, of course, but we may speculate that the
sentiment was present in the context of a political or
theological doctrine to which the designers
subscribed.
In this context, it should be remembered that the
tarot was the only type of Italian playing cards at
the time to include the rank of queen amongst the
courts. Italian cards, from the 14th century down to
the present day, consistently employ an all-male court
of footman, knight, and king. When one realizes that
the tarot introduced not only an Empress, but also a
Papess and four Queens, into the feudal power
structure of the times, the pointedness of these
female symbols becomes harder to ignore.
BTW, it grieves me a bit to hear the traditional tarot
designs sometimes described as "patriarchal" or "male
dominated". The traditional tarot used radically
egalitarian symbols of authority, which placed it in
stark contrast with the patriarchal institutions of
the dominant culture of the time.
http://www.tarothermit.com/empress.htm
Copyright 1999 Tom Tadfor Little
