For You to See Life - 4u2c.life

The Empress ~ symbolic meanings painted in the card.

The card of the Empress portrays a beautiful earthy woman with rich flowing brown hair, obviously pregnant and standing in a field of ripening barley. Her gown is woven of many different plants, and hemmed with leafy boughs. Around her neck is a necklace of twelve precious stones. She is crowned with a diadem of castles and towers. Behind her in a background of fertile fields, water flows into a pool.

The waterfall suggests the flow of feeling and fertility of Demeter’s world. She presides over the rites of marriage and blesses the fruits of its union.

The diadem of castles and towers which Demeter wears represents her rulership over the instinct to build secure homes in stone and wood, places of safety and peace.

The necklace of twelve stones symbolizes the twelve signs of the zodiac. As ruler of nature, Demeter governs the orderly cycle of the seasons and the laws of the cosmos.

Major Arcana ~ The Empress

Here we meet the great goddess Demeter, who is Earth Mother, ruler of all nature and protectress of young defenseless creatures. In Greek myth, Demeter ripened the golden grain each year, and in late summer the people offered thanks to her for the bounty of the earth. Demeter governed the orderly cycles ofnature and the life of all growing things - hence the gown in which she is clothed. She presided over the gestation and birth of new life, and blessed the rites of marriage as a vessel for the continuity of nature. Demeter is a matriarchal goddess, an image of the power within the earth itself, which needs no spiritual validation from heaven. She was said to have taught men the arts of ploughing and tilling the soil, and women the arts of grinding wheat and baking bread.

Demeter lived with her daughter Persephone sheltered from the conflicts and quarrels of the world. But one day this peaceful, happy life was violently changed. Persephone had gone out walking and did not return. In anguish Demeter searched everywhere for her daughter, but Persephone had vanished without trace. Eventually, after years of hopeless wandering, word came of Persephone’s fate. It seemed that Hades, the dark lord of the underworld, had been overcome with desire for the maiden, and had risen out of the earth in his chariot drawn by two black horses and abducted her.

Demeter in her rage allowed the earth to fall barren, and refused torestore it to its former abundance. Because she could not accept the change which had occurred - even though Persephone had willingly eaten of the pomegranate, the fruit of the underworld, and Hades had treated her with honour and made her his queen - it seemed as if the whole of mankind would perish from lack of food. Eventually, thanks to the intercession of the clever and all-seeing god Hermes, acompromise was agreed upon. For nine months of the year, Persephone would live with her mother, but for the remaining three she must return to her dark husband.

Demeter never came to terms with this solution. Every year while her daughter was away, the Earth Mother went into mourning. Flowers withered, trees shed their leaves, and the earth grew lifeless and cold.But every year, on Persephone’s return, the spring came again.

On an inner level, the image of Demeter, the Empress, reflects the experience of mothering. This does not mean only the physical processes of gestation, birth and nurturing of the young and helpless child. It is also the inner experience of the Great Mother: the discovery of the body as something valuable and precious which merits care, the experience of being part of nature and rooted in natural life, the appreciation of the senses and the simple pleasures of daily existence.

Without this Great Mother within us, we can bring nothing to fruition,for this is the side of us which has the patience and gentleness to wait until the time is ripe for action. Without her we cannot appreciate our physical selves, but live disconnected in a purely intellectual world without any grounding or respect for reality. A child’s experience of Mother is connected with the feeling of safety and trust in life, and the image of the Empress is likewise connected with the inner feeling of security and safety in the present. She is wise, but not in a cerebral way.

Hers is the wisdom of nature, which understands that all things move incycles and ripen at the appropriate time.But like all the images in the Tarot deck, Demeter has her dark side. Nothing but nature means stagnation of the spirit, and an apathy anddullness which crush all possibility of change. Demeter is not only the Good Mother; she is also the Mourning Mother, who cannot relinquish her possessions and who avenges any intrusion of life s conflicts intoher ordered, Eden-like world. This Mourning Mother can be full of bitterness and resentment because life requires change and separation,and endings must occur. Thus when the Fool on his archetypal journey encounters Demeter, the Empress, he is thrust into the dark and light dimensions of his own instinctual nature.

On a divinatory level, the appearance of the Empress in a spread suggests the onset of a more earthy phase of life. A marriage or the birth of a child might occur; or the birth of a creative child, an artistic offspring, for this too requires the patience and nurturing of the Great Mother. Through this card we enter the realm of the body and the instincts, as a place of both peace and stagnation, life-giving and life-suffocating. Thus the Fool, the child of heaven, discovers that he lives in a physical body and is a creature not only of spirit but also of earth.

I will explain in my readings what each card means, this is a general interpritation taken from the Mythic Tarot Deck

Information Source: Mythic Tarot Deck
[published in 1986 by Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene and Illustrated by Tricia Newell (not the New Mythic Tarot)]