For You to See Life - 4u2c.life

The Emperor ~ symbolic meanings painted in the card.

The card of the Emperor portrays a mature man with broad and muscular shoulders and chest. His rich, (lowing hair and beard are vivid auburn, and his eyes are a clear sky-blue. He faces us seated on a golden throne at the top of a mountain. His robe is purple bordered with gold, and on his head is a golden crown. In his right hand he holds three lightning bolts; in his left rests the globe of the world. An eagle perches on his shoulder. Behind him stretches a backdrop of snow-capped peaks.

The lightning bolt is Zeus' symbol of power not only because of its awesome grandeur, but also because it lights up the sky. Zeus is a god of inspiration and sudden creative vision, and the lightning symbolizes his revelation of the truth.

Zeus made his abode the mountain peaks because he is a god of mental and spiritual heights, and his will rises above the bondage of the body and the limitations of nature.

The eagle is Zeus’ emblem because of its keen sight and power to fly higher than other birds. As a bird of prey, it also expresses the aggression and conquering instinct of the god.

Major Arcana ~ The Emperor

Here we meet great Zeus, king of the gods, whom the Greeks called All-Father, creator of the world and sovereign of both gods and men. In myth, Zeus was the youngest son of the Titans Cronos and Rhea. A prophecy was given to Cronos that one day one of his sons would overthrow him and take his place. To guard against this, he decided to destroy his children, and for five years running, as Rhea bore him sons and daughters, he snatched them from her arms and swallowed them before they opened their eyes.

This naturally did not please Rhea, who when she knew that a sixth child was to be bom fled secretly to Arcadia and gave birth to Zeus in a cave. Then she wrapped a large stone in swaddling clothes and presented it to Cronos as her son. He promptly swallowed it. In time Zeus grew to manhood, and came to Cronos disguised as a cupbearer. He prepared a potion for his father which made him violently sick, and out of the old god’s mouth came all the five children he had swallowed, quite unharmed. Out, too, came the stone. Zeus then led his brothers and sisters in rebellion against Cronos and overthrew him, and inaugurated a new rule.

The new king of the gods made the mountain of Olympus his home, and established a hierarchy of gods who obeyed his ultimate law. His symbols of power were the thunder and the lightning bolt. His volatile, fiery, profligate spirit expressed itself not only in the thunderstorm, but also in the many lovers whom he pursued and the many children whom he fathered. Among them were Athene (goddess of justice), Dike (goddess of natural law), Moira (goddess of fate), and the nine Muses (patrons of the arts). His wife was Hera, goddess of marriage and childbirth, who ruled as his consort. Zeus dispensed good and evil according to the laws which he established. He was also god of the hearth and of friendship, and the protector of all men.

On an inner level, Zeus, the Emperor, is an image of the experience of fathering. It is the father who embodies our spiritual ideals, our ethical codes, the self-sufficiency with which we survive in the world, the authority and ambition which drive us to achieve, and the discipline and foresight necessary to accomplish our goals. This masculine principle within both men and women differs from the nurturing and unconditional love of the mother whom we met in the card of the Empress. Here it is the spirit, not the body, which is accorded the highest value, and action, rather than intuitive flowing with nature, which is demanded of us.

The father within us also fosters self-respect, because it is this part of us which can take a standpoint from which to meet life’s challenges. Zeus could be compassionate, and championed the weak and the dispossessed. But he could also be angry and vindictive if his authority was challenged and his laws broken. Thus Zeus, the Emperor, has a darker face, which is expressed on an inner level as rigidity and implacable self-righteousness. To be in relationship with the inner father means to possess a sense of one’s potency, one’s capacity to initiate ideas and concretize them in the world. To be dominated by the inner father means to be enslaved by a set of beliefs which crush all human feeling with their inflexibility and arrogance. Then, like Zeus himself, we must overthrow the old rule and inaugurate a newer and more creative one, lest we become petty tyrants ourselves or fall under the spell of a tyrant in the world outside. Having discovered the rich and fecund world of the body’s needs and pleasures, the Fool must now find ethical principles by which to live; for without the Emperor, we are mere pawns in life, driven from within and without by blind instinct, blaming our problems and difficulties on other people and on society, because we cannot find the inner experience of strength which the father embodies.

On a divinatory level, Zeus, the Emperor, augurs a confrontation with the issue of the father principle in both its positive and negative forms. We are challenged to make something manifest, to concretize a creative idea, to build something in the world, to found a business perhaps, or to establish the structure of a home and family. We are asked to take a standpoint, to become effective and powerful, to formulate our ideas and ethics. We are also asked to consider where the creative young king has become the rigid, oppressive tyrant, and where our idealogies are interfering with life and growth. When the Fool meets the Emperor after his sojourn in the instinctual world, he leams to confront worldly life with his own resources, alone, according to ethics which he must develop for himself. Then he can progress on his journey with the certainty that he can be effective in life because there is something higher in which he believes, and whose authority he himself now embodies.

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)]