The Tarot of Eli 2: The Rider-Wait-Smith Tarot - Key 3-The Empress & The Ocean Tarot-Key 3-The Empress

elitarot2strikingly.com

Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot — Key 3: The Empress

Venus, the Great Mother, and the Doorway of Manifestation

In the Western Hermetic Qabalah, The Empress is the path connecting Chokmah and Binah on the Tree of Life. She is the living bridge between the dynamic outpouring of Wisdom and the Great Mother of Understanding. Chokmah is the primal flash of force; Binah is the Supernal Womb that receives, limits, shapes, and gives birth to form. Therefore, The Empress is not merely “motherhood” in the mundane sense. She is the cosmic process by which invisible Spirit becomes living manifestation.

The Rider-Waite-Smith Empress emphasizes this flow of life through the imagery of Mother Earth and Mother Venus. Her robe is decorated with Venusian symbols, and her heart-shaped shield bears the astrological glyph of Venus. The cypress trees and pearls in the background are also sacred to Venus, while the golden wheat in the foreground suggests fertility, nourishment, and the ripening power of nature. She is the Lady of increase, abundance, beauty, sensuality, and organic growth.

Her crown of twelve stars represents the zodiac, showing that her creative power operates through the entire circle of cosmic manifestation. She is not limited to personal fertility; she is the mother of cycles, seasons, bodies, instincts, emotions, and incarnate experience. The flowing water in the card recalls the sea-born Aphrodite, rising from the waters of the unconscious as beauty, desire, and attraction.

In this sense, The Empress follows The High Priestess. The High Priestess is pristine, lunar, and veiled consciousness; The Empress is that same hidden consciousness becoming instinct, image, body, emotion, and fertile thought-form. She is the transition from silent mystery into living nature.

The orb or scepter in her hand may be read as a solar emblem, pointing toward Tiphareth, the sixth Sephirah, the sphere of the Sun/Son and the Solar Self. In Hermetic Qabalah, Tiphareth is the balanced center of the Tree, the radiant Soul that harmonizes the higher and lower worlds. Thus, the thought-forms of the Great Mother are eventually administered and organized through the Solar Self, becoming the denser expressions we call manifestation.

The Empress is also a doorway. She is the Gate of Life and the Gate of Return. Through her, souls enter incarnation; through her, forms also dissolve back into the Great Womb of the unseen. Ancient cultures often symbolized this mystery through the sacred feminine gate, the yoni, representing birth, death, rebirth, and the creative matrix of existence. This is not merely sexual symbolism, but metaphysical symbolism: the universe itself is born through a womb-like passage from potential into appearance.

This is why The Empress can be linked to the ancient idea of Janua Coeli, the “Gateway of Heaven.” The door of the Goddess opens in two directions: one toward birth, embodiment, and experience; the other toward death, dissolution, and return. She is the Mother of forms, but also the one who receives forms back into herself. She governs fertility and reincarnation, attraction and surrender, love and loss, pleasure and transformation.

Cosmologically, The Empress builds life-forms around the spiral intelligence of Spirit. She establishes the laws of formation, rhythm, gestation, and manifestation. She is the Supernal Feminine Force, Venus-Aphrodite-Isis clothed in the robes of nature. Love is her law because love is the magnetic power that unites Spirit and form, idea and body, seed and womb.

Psychologically and parapsychologically, The Empress is the Mother Archetype within the unconscious. To encounter her is to encounter our emotional body, our instincts, our relationship to nurture, protection, desire, creativity, and our personal experience of mothering—whether gentle, painful, absent, overwhelming, or healing. Meditation on The Empress can bring unconscious material to the surface, especially concerning love, dependency, embodiment, creativity, and the need to feel safe within life.

In Hermetic terms, the formula of creation is often expressed as 0 = 2: from No-Thing arises polarity, Father and Mother, Force and Form, Chokmah and Binah. From their union comes the Son/Sun, the Solar Self of Tiphareth. This “Son” is not a male gender in the ordinary sense, but the balanced Divine Human, the Solar Soul, the Adam Khadmon pattern of perfected consciousness. The Empress nourishes this Solar Self by giving it a body, a field of experience, and a world in which it may awaken.

Therefore, The Empress is the mystery of pure fruition. She is emotion before it becomes love or hate; desire before it becomes attachment; fertility before it becomes a child, an artwork, a relationship, or a world. She is the raw creative substance of existence, the luminous dark ocean from which all “I AM” arises.

All life on Earth is under her providence, for she is the Great Mother who receives the Light of Chokmah and shapes it through Binah into living form. She is the Illuminating Intelligence, the Mother of Light, and the oceanic womb of consciousness. To pass through her is to enter manifestation; to return through her is to enter the Supreme Mystery.

Hermetic insight: The Empress teaches that creation is not separate from love. Every body, dream, idea, and soul-experience is born through her gate. She is Venus as beauty, Isis as nature, Binah as the Womb of Understanding, and the eternal Mother whose darkness gives birth to the light.

Ocean Tarot — Key 3: The Empress

The Great Mother as the Ocean of Consciousness

In the Ocean Tarot, The Empress is shown as the fertile Ocean itself, the Great Mother as living consciousness in its generative, nourishing, and abundant form. Seated upon a scallop shell throne, she immediately recalls Venus-Aphrodite rising from the sea, for the shell has long been a symbol of beauty, fertility, love, and the womb of creation. Here the Empress is not only a ruler of nature, but the very matrix from which life arises.

Her mermaid form deepens the metaphysical symbolism. She is both human and oceanic, both self-aware and instinctual, suggesting that consciousness is never separate from the deep subconscious waters from which thoughts, feelings, dreams, and desires emerge. In Western Hermetic terms, she may be understood as the Great Mother principle through which subtle force becomes living form. She is the nurturing field in which imagination, emotion, and manifestation grow.

The coral crown upon her head emphasizes fertility, organic growth, and the branching patterns of life itself. Coral is formed slowly, layer upon layer, much like creation unfolds through gradual embodiment. Her white garments suggest purity, receptivity, and the luminous body of the Divine Feminine. She does not create through violence or strain, but through attraction, gestation, and natural unfoldment. This is the mystery of the Empress: growth through nourishment, beauty through harmony, and manifestation through loving receptivity.

The gold and white trident she holds as a scepter shows that she governs the waters rather than being overwhelmed by them. Symbolically, the trident may be read as dominion over the threefold currents of consciousness—instinct, emotion, and imagination—or the threefold movement of creation: conception, gestation, and birth. Gold adds a solar note, suggesting that even in the watery depths of the Great Mother there is an ordering intelligence, a hidden light within the subconscious sea.

Her throne standing between twin marble pillars is also significant. The pillars imply balance, polarity, and structure. In this way, the Ocean Empress unites the fluid and the stable, the fertile and the ordered. She is not chaotic emotion, but creative consciousness held in form. She is the oceanic field of life brought into harmony and beauty.

Parapsychologically, this Empress image speaks strongly of the subconscious as a womb of psychic creation. She reflects the inner realm where symbols, intuitions, emotional impressions, and soul-images first arise before becoming outer events. She is the archetype of nurture, but also of psychic receptivity. To meditate on her is to reconnect with one’s inner tides, the place where creativity, intuition, sensuality, and self-worth are restored.

Thus, when this card appears upright, it suggests fertility, creativity, nurture, abundance, and emotional wholeness. It encourages you to nourish your ideas, relationships, and inner beauty so that they may ripen naturally. It is a reminder that true creation requires both inspiration and patient care.

In reversal, the Ocean Empress suggests that this natural flow has been obstructed. Neglect, emotional depletion, or creative blockage may be hindering growth. You may be separated from your own nurturing current. The remedy is not force, but self-care, emotional restoration, and a return to the inner waters. Reconnect with the feminine principle within—the power to receive, heal, and regenerate. (This reversal also applies to the RWS-Key 3-The Empress.)

Comparison: Rider-Waite-Smith Empress and Ocean Tarot Empress

The Rider-Waite-Smith Empress presents the Mother as earthly Venus, surrounded by wheat, forests, flowing water, and the symbols of sensual abundance, showing her as the fertile body of nature and the lawful beauty of manifestation.

The Ocean Tarot Empress, by contrast, presents her as the watery womb of consciousness, a mermaid queen enthroned in the sea, emphasizing the subconscious, emotional, and psychic dimensions of creation.

Both cards express the same Hermetic truth: The Empress is the Great Mother who brings life into form, whether through the fecund richness of the Earth or the living depths of the Ocean. The RWS image stresses natural growth, fertility, and Venusian embodiment, while the Ocean Tarot stresses intuition, emotional nurture, and the creative sea of consciousness. Together they teach that manifestation is born through both body and soul, through the field of nature and the waters of the inner life.

When the Empress card is thrown:

• The querent is experiencing the principle of wise love.
• The power of owning your own inherited maternal and loving nature that resides within.
• There is an opening to all sensuality and delighting in luxury of the senses, as does a child, before they are taught to fear them.
• One finds comfort among the natural, having no need for control. 
• A surge of Creative imagination, as imagination is everything in our reality, this promises achievement and success in our goals.
• The querent may experience a high dedication to healing and nurturing. 
• Overall, THE EMPRESS represents happiness, stable relationships, growth, and fertility.
• Hard work pays off. 
• Love of luxurious things.
• Pregnancy and birth.

If ill defined by surrounding cards or reversed, it implies:

• Motherhood issues.
• Dissipation.
• Luxuries.
• Sensuality.

Thank you for your interest, your thoughtful comments, subscriptions (free), and your generous support.
Your donations help keep this work alive and accessible to all sincere seekers.
May your generosity return to you in abundance. May you live long and prosper.

Traditional Tarot Card Comparisons blog, Tarot classes and readings store.

Home page, Tarot Store, Master Tarot Classes, and nontraditional tarot card comparisons.

Western Hermetic Magick invocation and ritual website plus, magick blogs.