This post was first added in 2018, then revised slightly in November, 2022. In January of 2023 some additions and subtractions were made. The footnotes are now not completely consecutive, but the numbers in the text still attach to the right notes.
1. The Empress in Italy
It is not known whether the tarot deck originally had all 22
of its special cards, or whether they evolved gradually, as the early decks
that have survived, all of a “luxury” type, invariably have fewer surviving
cards than the 22 we know. Neither the Magician nor the High Priestess has a
surviving likeness in the earliest fragmentary tarots, but the Empress does. It
appears in both the Visconti Tarot of c. 1441-1444 Milan and a card now in
Palermo which was probably part of the so-called “Alessandro Sforza” deck (also
called “Urbino” and “Catania” from where these cards now are. This deck was
probably done by a Florentine artist. The
date of 1428 can be seen on the paper used to make the card, suggesting a date
of the 1430s or later for the card.[1]
The Empress as a subject may have first appeared in a predecessor deck of the Tarot
called “VIII Imperatori,” recorded in Ferrara of 1423 as bought for a lady
there from a Florentine workshop. That deck may have been a regular deck with
the four usual suits but with two “Imperator” cards added per suit, an Emperor
and Empress paralleling the King and Queen below them. These cards would perhaps
have had the ability to capture cards in other suits as well as those below
them in their own, in that way resembling the “trumps” of the game that
followed.[2]
Any medieval queen was indeed expected to style herself as Mary Queen of Heaven, displaying the motherly virtues of compassion, clemency, and mercy; in fact, the little lady wearing a red robe similar to that of the empress seems to welcome the other figure, who stands in the conventionally submissive pose of a monarch’s dutiful subject. These two figures could therefore personify the qualities proper to the ideal role of an empress.
So one meaning of the card, from the globe and scepter, when they are present, is that of female authority, in a secular sense yet also with the blessing of spiritual authority.
The Visconti Empress card of Milan (below left) is indicated by a
different Imperial insignia, that of a single-headed eagle on a shield that
rests on her knee. The single-headed eagle had been an insignia of the Roman
Empire in ancient times and had been adopted by the Holy Roman Empire, which
claimed to be its successor. At some point around the time of the card, the
Empire changed to a double-headed one; Maggio suggests that this happened in
1431, based on a 1512 painting by Dürer of Emperor Sigismund with Charlemagne;
Charlemagne reigned c. 800 and is depicted with a single-headed eagle, while
Sigismund reigned 1431-1437 and is depicted with a double-headed eagle.[5]
That the likely commissioner of the deck, Duke Filippo Maria Visconti, wanted
the single-headed eagle even in the 1440s, the likely date of the deck, may
signify that he wanted to show that the Visconti had been anointed dukes of the
Empire before the change. In contrast, in the version now in Palermo, the eagle
is absent, emphasizing instead the fleur-de-lys, which besides
symbolizing the Empire was also the emblem of Florence. Florence did not fall
under the historic domain of the Holy Roman Empire.
The Visconti Empress’s staff is a simple stick with no insignia, and she is
surrounded by four smaller female attendants, as opposed to the two of the
Palermo card. It is possible that these represent four main vassal states of
the Empire: Burgundy in the west, Germany in the north, Bohemia in the west,
and Italy in the south, and that the Empress herself was meant to bear a
resemblance to the wife of Emperor Sigismund, Barbara of Cilli, even if, as
Maggio points out, she did not go to Italy for her husband’s coronations, in
Milan 1431 as King of Italy (a purely honorific title) and in 1433 as Holy
Roman Emperor: a r
ough likeness was known from her attendance at the Council of
Constance.[6]
The next Empress card appears in the Visconti-Sforza deck of the 1450s (near left).[7] She again has the shield on her lap, but without attendants. One of her gloves is green; this is a color that naturally symbolizes the fecundity of spring, the time of new birth. The court figures in the Visconti-Sforza deck’s suit of Bastoni, i.e. staves (corresponding to Wands today) also wear green gloves or sleeves, as does the woman on the Love card.[8] Again her fecundity is suggested, the greenery of spring. There may be some symbolic relationship to the lyrics of the song “Greensleeves,” which although of 16th century England is said to conform stylistically to Italian poetic conventions.[9] Bianca Maria bore her husband nine children. Although now barely visible, this Empress’s gown is incised with has palm fronds sticking out of a crown, a Visconti device, and three interlocking rings,a device associated with the city of Cremona, which her husband acquired in 1450.[10]
People then would have also noticed a resemblance to the Madonna and Child in religious art, but with the shield and its eagle instead of the infant Jesus. The eagle, among its many meanings, was an early symbol of the saints and Christ. Andrea Vitali in an essay on this card cites the 5th-century Liber formularum spiritalis intelligentiae of Saint Eucherius of Lyon:[11]
The Eagles are the saints; in the Gospel (Matt. 24:28) it is written: ‘Wherever there is a corpse, here the eagles will be assembled’. Because the holy souls, when they go out of the body, meet Christ, who dying became himself a corpse for them. The eagle also means Christ, as in Solomon (Proverbs 30:19), that is, the ascension of Christ.
The eagle shield on the Empress’s lap thus mimics the Christ-child on the lap of the Virgin. That double meaning is also present in “Greensleeves,” where the singer’s “one true love” turns out to be Christ.
An Empress would have been thought, like the Madonna, to embody and model for others all the maternal virtues. The most important of these, one that the Virgin possessed only in a spiritual sense, was that of continuing the paternal line, so as to ensure the continuity of the Empire in the hands of his family. The eagle is both the symbol of the Empire and a representation of its continuation.
Some might have noticed a resemblance to the figure of Isis on Roman coins, shown there with her infant son Horus on her lap; he was often depicted as a hawk, although I don’t know if the Renaissance knew that. Scholars who knew Greek would have read in Horapollo that hawks symbolized “Ares,” the god of war and victory.[12] They also knew, from Plutarch, that Isis could turn herself into a swallow and that Osiris was represented as a hawk. So naturally, their son Horus, the victorious warrior, would be such a bird, too.[13] By the late 15th century, the myth of Isis was much celebrated in Italy. Notice also the sides of the "Cary Sheet" of c. 1500, either French or Milanese, which resemble the wings of a bird.
The image of a young woman with a child on her lap was also, in the 1499 Hypnerotomachia (Strife of love in a dream), identified there as Venus with Cupid, as part of an imaginary cult of Venus, whose Abbess bore the three-tiered crown of the Popess.[14]
In the decks that followed, Ferrara (center above) preserved the eagle, since some of the dukedom’s domain was part of the historic Holy Roman Empire (Ferrara itself was part of the Papal State), in its case using the double-headed eagle.[15] Those of Florence and south, like the card in Palermo, have the fleur-de-lys. Pictured (at right above) is the Rosenwald, which may have been printed in Perugia but has much in common with cards from both Florence and Bologna. [16]
One variant, that of Bologna, came to be simply one of four papi.
(While papa meant “pope,” there is also the meaning of
“The best, the ablest, the most esteemed in a category of people, in a social
group.”[17])
Two of them have imperial crowns and two, papal crowns (see above, from a late 17th-century
Bolognese deck.[18] While
the bearded one is clearly male, the other is more ambiguously drawn, with hair
that is shorter than usually depicted for a woman. The "papa" at the far right below, with a papal crown, looks even more feminine. 
Yet there are reasons
for supposing that these cards were not simply “papi” all along. One is that a
composition by the Bolognese author Giulio Cesare Croce in 1601 refers to both
an Empress and an Emperor.[19]
The other reason is that there is a similar situation in the Florentine
expanded game of Minchiate, where all three of the dignitaries are also simply
called “papi.” The corresponding tarot deck, also had just three dignitaries,
with the empress, emperor, and pope named as such, a practice that in fact
carried over into minchiate in the 16th century, as indicated in a
poem of around 1535.[20]
The cards in common between minchiate and Bolognese Tarocchi (called tarocchini) are much alike in
appearance, and both games allow for extra points for certain combinations of
triumph cards. In particular, both minchiate and Bolognese tarocchi have the rule
that capturing three or four of the ”papi” in tricks (even five in Minchiate, which
included the Bagat and Love under that term) earned extra points.[21]
So it would make sense to have a general designation for all of them; in both
games, the word chosen was “papi,” and over time that was all that mattered.
2. The Empress in France
The earliest surviving Empress card in France, that of
Catelin Geoffroy (far left below), does not show the Imperial eagle. There is no reason why it
should, as Lyon was not an Imperial city; the same is true of the Anonymous
Parisian (second left), of the early 17th century. But the style that became known as the “Tarot of
Marseille” did have it, in the Milanese tradition of the shield with a
single-headed eagle on her lap; examples are the cards of Jean Noblet, c. 1650
Paris (third from left), and Nicholas Conver, 1760 Marseille (far right).[22]
If this practice derives from the French occupation of Milan in the early 16th
century, both must have existed for quite a while. Notice the similarity between the “Cary Sheet” version of c. 1500 (2nd above, far right) to the “Marseille” Empress in the designs of many cards, including the Empress.
Her staff, in the "Tarot of Marseille" style, is now topped by a circle divided into three parts—the three continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa, surmounted by a cross, the symbol of Christianity, as explicitly written on its segments in a 1466 Florentine Triumph of Fame at left.[24] This symbol of domination was also associated with the Ascended Virgin.
Court de Gebelin simply refers to her as the Queen, feminine counterpart of the King. He identifies the bird on her shield as an eagle. Oddly enough, he does not connect her to Egypt, where an identification with Isis would have been easy enough. His colleague de Mellet, in a foonote does admit Osiris as one possibility; if so, Isis would be a possibility for the Queen. Both figures, he observes, have "sawteeth" on the bottom of their "helmet." It stands for "insatiability," or, in the case of Osiris, "vengeance."
In 1789, Etteilla put out the first tarot deck designed especially for
divination. Although he had claimed, following Court de Gébelin
in 1781, that the Tarot was originally Egyptian and that his deck restored the
original designs, the imagery actually has little in it that corresponds to the
art of ancient Egypt or suggests ancient Egyptian culture in particular.[25]
The astronomical and biological entities depicted on these cards are probably irrelevant for our study. Of more interest are the keywords, the ones on card 6 for the Empress and card 7 for the Emperor (the latter to be discussed in a later post). Besides the two keywords, Etteilla's followers constructed at least two lists supplementing the keywords. I have discussed some of the "Night" entries in relation to the Popess; now I want to focus on their contrast with the entries for "Day." Since there is much overlap between the two lists, I have combined them, with those in one list and not the other either in bold (in"Julia Orisini," 1838) or italics (in Papus, trans. Stockman, 1909):[27]
6. Upright: NIGHT—Obscurity,
Darkness, Lack of Light, Night Scene [Fr. Nocturnal], Mystery, Secret, Mask,
Hidden, Unknown, Clandestine, Occult. Eclipse.—Veil, Symbol, Figure, Image,
Parable, Allegory, Mystic Fire, Veiled Purpose, Mystic Meaning,
Mysterious words, Obscure discourse, Occult Science.—Hidden Machinations,
Mysterious Intervention, Clandestine Actions, In secret, Clandestinely,
Derision.—Blindness, Confused, Entangle, Cover, Wrap , Forget,
Forgotten, Difficulty, Doubt, Ignorance.
Reversed: DAY. Clarity, Light, Brilliance, Splendor, Illumination, Manifestation,
Evidence, Truth.—Clear, Visible, Luminous, Bring into Being, Bring to Light,
Publish, Make Appear.—Pierce, Make a Way for Oneself, Clearing (or
Clarification: s'eclairer), Acquire Knowledge.—Public Joys, Fireworks.—Expedient,
Easiness.—Opening Up, Window, Gap, Zodiac.
It seems to me that Etteilla may have combined, thanks to his "upright" and "reversed" meanings, associations to two cards in previous cartomancy, namely the Popess and the Empress. For "night" we have the theme of the "veil" and secret knowledge. That would be the veil that de Gébelin had seen on the Popess, or High Priestess, as he called the card. For "Day" we then have the revealing of what was hidden, "Isis Unveiled," as it were--the pregnant Virgin now become the Madonna. The Empress would connote the manifestation of what was hidden in the Popess, her child.
Etteilla's upright meanings correspond closely to the Queen of the Night in Mozart's opera. If in the 18th century the Popess wore a mask, that mask is now off,
displaying powerful emotions that ensnare her male victims in her curtain, as captured
in this 1818 watercolor by Simon Quaglio, now at the Morgan Library in
New York. The Queen sets the hero on a journey to rescue her daughter from an
evil sorcerer. He soon finds that the abductor is the wise
Sorastro, a play on "Zoroastro," Italian for the ancient Persian Magus, and he has landed in a land whose gods are those indicated by the Act 1 finale, “To Isis
and Osiris.” The Queen of the Night is not such an Isis, but a wilder
supreme being of an earlier time who will not submit to the taming
influence of patriarchal high civilization. Her emotions are the reversed meanings for the "female enquirer" with which Etteilla had replaced the Popess.but her emotional turmoil as well, which Etteilla expresses in the Reversed meanings for his "female enquirer" card:
Reversed: Imitation, Garden of Eden, effervescence, seething [boullionment, boiling], fermentation, ferment, leaven, acidity.
Her daughter, however, corresponds to Etteilla's meanings for "Day." Rejecting her mother, she becomes the positive anima who leads the hero in
trials of water and fire - in that regard, becoming the High Priestess of her new cult, that of Isis and Osiris. Conjointly
they will rule the kingdom, a harmonious synthesis of masculine and
feminine. The Queen secretly engineers a rebellion but is sent to
oblivion.
Etteilla's abolition of the Empress on the card did not go unchallenged, even by occultists. The sun and the moon were just too abstract. Starting
with Eliphas Levi, in the days of France's Second Empire, they went back to the traditional imagery of the Tarot of
Marseille, but with a few changes. Calling the card the Empress again, Levi described her as “a winged
woman, crowned, sitting and holding the world at the end of her scepter; she
has as a sign the eagle, “image of the soul and of life.”[28]
She was “Venus-Urania” of the Greeks (here “Urania” is Greek for “heaven”) and
the “woman clothed with the sun” of the Book of Revelation. She was also “queen
of heaven,” no doubt referring to the same woman as the Virgin assumed into
heaven. In that way he erased the old distinction between secular and spiritual leaders, which Etteilla had already blurred, and spiritualized both cards.
Levi's student Paul Christian saw her as “Isis-Urania,” thus Egyptianizing
Levi’s “Venus-Urania.”[29]
Venus, after all, was one of the goddesses subsumed by Isis in her Roman cult,
as described by Apuleius in his novel Metamorphoses (known popularly as The
Golden Ass).[30]
Astrologically, however, he kept the identification with Venus. Christian also
identified her with “Nature in labor” and “the germination of the acts that are
to spring from the Will”, in other words “Action”, and the scepter with a globe
on the end was a sign of “her perpetual activity over things born and unborn.”
“Will” here is apparently to be understood in the manner of Schopenhauer, as a
driving force within all things, nature as well as humanity, driving things and
people to unfold in material form according to a preconceived plan, either in
the mind of God, in his Wisdom, or the mind of the person concerned. After the
Will to manifest (Magician) and the knowledge received by consciousness (High
Priestess), it is the act of applying the combination of the two in the world. In this way she was now both spiritual and material.
The eagle is no longer is on a shield but rather “on her other hand” as opposed
to that with the scepter; it is the “symbol of the heights to which the Spirit
may soar.” Accordingly, when Christian's description was converted to a
card by Maurice Wegener and Robert Falconnier in 1896, it is an actual bird,
hovering in the air above the hand of "Isis-Urania."[31]
Twenty years later, Papus elaborated further on the conceptions of Levi and
Christian. Keeping the identification with Venus, he added, albeit without
comment, that of the Kabbalist Tree of Life's Binah. In his exposition he
explained that the Empress represents the mystery by which the spirit unites itself
to matter, by which the Divine becomes Human. This is not just the birth of
Christ from the Virgin. It is “the ideas of generation, of embodiment in all
the worlds,” including “how the human being becomes corporeal in the womb of a
woman.”[32]
That she has wings shows that she represents “the idea of the spirituality of
the vivifying principle of all Beings.” Moreover the card expresses the
combination of Osiris and Isis, the equilibrium represented by Horus, the son
of Isis and Osiris, and of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit, that is to say, it the balanced union of the two. This point is a very old one, made by John of Salisbury at Chartres in the 12th century. It seems to be an application of a point that Porphyry attributed to the Pythagoreans in his "Life of Pythagoras. Porphyry had said, "The Number One denoted to them the reason of Unity, Identity, Equality,
the purpose of friendship. sympathy, and the conservation of the
universe, which results in persistence in Sameness." John then applied that formula to the Trinity (Joannis Saresberiensis, Opera Omnia, vol. 5, p. 233).:
Deus est unitas: ab unitate gignitur unitatis aequalite procedit. Hinc igitur Augustinus: Omne recte intuenti perspicuum est; quare a sanctae scripturae docturibus patri assignatur unitas, Filius aequalitas, Spiritui Sancto connexio; et licet ab unitate gignatur aequalitas, ab utroque connexio procedat: unum tamen et idem sunt. Haec est illa trium unitas: quam solam adorandam esse docuit Pythagoras.
Marco Ponzi on Tarot History Forum translated this quotation (https://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?p=9383#p9383):
God is unity: generated by unity he proceeds from the equality of the unity. Therefore Augustine: everything is clear to he who examines in the right way; for this reason those who have studied the holy scripture attribute unity to the father, equality to the Son, union to the Holy Spirit; it follows that equality is generated from unity, and that union proceeds from both [unity and equality]: yet they are one and the same. This is the unity of the three: which Pythagoras taught to be the only thing [deserving] to be adored
In other words, the Holy Spirit, representing the combination of the one and what is equal to it, is also one, and so the same as the other two.
Papus then applies his more general point, about the equilibrium of two things being identical to both, to humanity, as the equilibrium of Adam and Eve, and the universe, as “the
world, conceived as a Being.”[33] By means of the eagle, representing the son, likewise, Isis combines the masculinity
of card 1 with the femininity of card 2. At the same time there is something new, the uniting of spirit with matter.
Oswald Wirth, in his book of 1927, but using the card he had designed for Papus in 1889, reasserted Levi's and Papus's ideas. She was again the woman of Rev. 12:1, in which, “A
woman clothed with the sun appeared in the sky, with the moon under her feet
and a crown of twelve stars on her head." As in medieval depictions of
her, for example the one at left, from ca. 1330 Normandy,[34] Wirth's Empress has 12 stars around her head and a crescent moon under her foot.
That its horns point downward instead of upward, as was traditional (as in the image at far right), suggests
the downward movement of spirit into matter, Papus's addition to Levi.
As Levi had specified, Wirth's Empress is winged. The woman of Revelation 12 likewise was sometimes shown with wings (e.g.in a 1497-1498 woodcut by Dürer, of which the relevant detail is above right.[35]), because she is able to successfully flee a dragon that had been waiting to devour her child. The child, meanwhile, had been borne upwards to heaven, traditionally carried aloft by angels. The eagle on the shield has its own wings, with no need of angels.
Wirth, in his own book of 1927, like Papus related her to the Kabbalists’ third sefirah, Binah. Binah in Kabbalah signifies "Understanding" or "Intelligence," and also is the "mother with seven children," meaning the seven sefiroth below Binah.[36] In that spirit Wirth calls the Empress “Creative Intelligence, mother of form, pictures, and ideas.”[37] If the Magician signifies Intent and the High Priestess an idea not yet in consciousness, the Empress seems to be the idea in application to the world. This is consonant with the identification of the Magician with God the Father, who creates the ideal archetypes, the Popess as the Virgin pregnant with Jesus, the earthly representative of those ideals, and the Empress as manifesting the Ideal in an immature realization, i.e. the Christ child. Wirth also calls her “discernment, reflection, study, observation, inductive science, Instruction, knowledge, erudition.” However, she is also, as Empress, the epitome of “grace, charm, gentleness, rule through goodness, and so on. Negatively, Wirth declared, she stands for superficiality.[38]
Waite in his famous deck of 1909 omits the eagle
altogether, emphasizing instead the circle and cross on the scepter, which he
turns upside down to make the astrological symbol of Venus (at left below). It is also in keeping
with the identification with Venus in the Hypnerotomachia and with
Venus’s attributes of grace and charm. Waite does include Wirth’s 12 stars around her head and the moon under her feet, but
states “she is not the Queen of Heaven.”[39] For Waite she is “universal fecundity,” as well as “activity generally”;
these are phrases that go back to Paul Christian, but on just his lowest level of the material world. The card has green trees in
the background and ripening wheat in the foreground, suggesting an affinity
with the fruitfulness of the earth, including agriculture as well as nature in the wild. In divinatory meanings, he is consistent
with Wirth in finding in her “the unraveling of involved matters”; its negative
counterpart, for the reversed card, is “confusion.”[40]
Waite also calls the Empress card “the door to the garden of Venus” and “the
inferior Garden of Eden, the Earthly Paradise, all that is symbolized by the
visible house of man.”[41]
This interpretation seems inspired by Etteilla’s card of the Female Enquirer,
which showed a woman with eleven circles around her (11 is for Etteilla the
number of sin) in a natural setting (at right), with one of its meanings given by his followers as "Garden of Eden."[42]
In a sense, Waite's lush natural surroundings make up for the lack of an eagle
on the Empress's shield. By some, large birds in themselves signify nature. When
a specific bird is mentioned, however, it isn't an eagle, but a vulture. Leon
Alberti says, in his treatise on architecture, "The Egyptians employed the
following sign language: a god was represented by an eye, nature by a vulture."[43]
His source is a text by the Roman general Ammianus.[44]
In 1499 the Hypnerotomachia (Strife of Love in a Dream) also
implied that a vulture represents nature, in its translation of a
"hieroglyphic" inscription that the protagonist Porphilo sees. It
shows, for its second image, an altar with, “on its face, the images of an eye
and a vulture."[45]
The second phrase of the "translation" reads "...to the god of
nature..." Below I have reproduced the first line of the
hieroglyphs and put under it the first line of what the novel says is its
translation into Latin. The first hieroglyph (an ox skull) is translated as "from your
labors"; the second is "to the god of nature," (the eye apparently representing "god"), followed by
"freely" and "sacrifice" (the urn). There is more, but that is enough for present purposes. The word order follows
that of ordinary Latin.
She is naked, to denote the Principle of Nature, that is active or Form, and passive or Matter. The turgid Breasts denote the Form, because it maintains created Things; the Vultur, a ravenous Fowl, the Matter; which being alter'd and moved by the Form, destroys all corruptible Bodies.
In such manner the vulture is associated with nature, and
thence to Isis, as the eminent French historian of esotericism Pierre Hadot has
argued.[47]
Perhaps influenced by his study of the Kabbalah, Waite sees the Empress as both
the entrance to life and the exit from this world[49] in other words, birth and death. That might also be interpreted figuratively as the materialization of an
idea and the abstraction from materializations (Wirth’s “inductive science”).
The Golden Dawn and its successors in the English-speaking world
identify the Empress with a path on the Tree of Life rather than, as for
Papus and Wirth, one of its sefiroth. Specifically, she is the path
between
Binah and Hochmah, associated with the letter Daleth, meaning "door."[48]
As such, for someone “working the paths” upward, she would have been the door
to the hidden truths of Hochmah. How that can be reconciled with Waite's emphasis on this-worldly fecundity is not clear, since both Binah and Hochmah are far above the natural world.
This conception could again apply to the sefira Binah, because the Kabbalists saw Binah as the mother of souls, and “the great jubilee” of souls' return to their source.[50]
By contrast with the High Priestess, 'who is a cold, virgin figure corresponding to the Moon, the Empress is warm and maternal. She is the Great Mother, pregnant with the world of form. In this figure all the mother goddesses of the ancient world are synthesized, but she is particularly Aphrodite, or Venus.
Although the High Priestess is her basis, represented by the
Moon at her feet, she also receives input from above, as indicated by the 12
stars around her head (10-4). It is his version of the impregnation of matter
by spirit. She also represents the exercise of imagination, which is manifested
in "the arts, fine and useful," as shown by a richly ornamented
seat, in contrast to the "severe cube" of the Priestess (10-5). Instead of
Waite's astrological sign for Venus on her shield, which Case puts on her
scepter, Case has a dove, which besides being sacred to Venus represents the
Holy Spirit in the esoteric meaning of that symbol (10-4). He quotes a certain P. F. G. Lacuria: "The number three reveals to us the harmony of the Holy Spirit. The number 3 is the return to unity, which seems to be broken by the number 2. It is in the
uniting of the Father with the Son that the Holy Spirit realizes itself, and on this account it may be considered the efflorescence of the unity." He does not explain further, but the point would seem to be the same as what John of Salisbury got from Porphyry (see my discussion of Papus above): combining the one with what is equal to it results in the one again, but now as a connecting principle.
4. The Jungian Turn
For Sallie Nichols in Jung and Tarot, the Empress personifies the Mother
archetype, in both its personal and cosmic manifestations. Jung and his
followers wrote a lot about this archetype, for example Erich Neumann's The
Great Mother, which Jung says is a particular aspect of the archetype.
Jung says of the mother archetype (CW 9, part 1, p. 16):
The qualities associated with it are maternal solicitude and sympathy; the magic authority of the female; the wisdom and spiritual exaltation that transcend reason; any helpful instinct or impulse; all that is benign, all that cherishes and sustains, all that fosters growth and fertility. The place of magic transformation and rebirth, together with the underworld and its inhabitants, are presided over by the mother. On the negative side the mother archetype may connote anything secret, hidden, dark; the abyss, the world of the dead, anything that devours, seduces, and poisons, that is terrifying and inescapable like fate.
Applied to the tarot, the problem is that this definition is so broad it would include the Priestess as well. Here Nichols has a nice set of contrasts to differentiate the two:[51]
The Popess is High Priestess and
Virgin; the Empress is Madonna and Royal Queen.
The Popess is patience and passive waiting; the Empress is action and
completion.
The Popess is ruled by love, the Empress rules by love.
'The Popess guards something old; the Empress reveals something new.
In short, the Popess holds the book of prophecy, and the Empress enacts and
fulfills this prophecy. The book is no longer needed, for the new King is born.
In terms of the alchemical process that is Jung's lens, the distinction might be between stages of development, with the Empress's domain being actovotu in the material world and the Priestess more in the world of ideas or spirit, both before and after the stage of action. Since the Empress's activity includes all of nature, conscious choice need not be assumed, just a material result. However, to the extent that action is conscious, it is one of choice and hence involves the feeling function of valuation, as well as a return from ideas to the reality of the five senses. It is then the third stage of Sapientia (see the end of my post on the Popess/Priestess), where the alchemist says "rend your books."
Nichols does not apply Jung's four-stage model of anima development. However, as subject rather than object, the Empress would seem to fit the first stage at least.[52] Jung characterizes it as "the personification of a purely instinctual relationship." He goes on to say (CW vol. 16, in archive.org, para. 361, p. 173:
The first stage - Hawwah, Eve, earth - is purely biological; woman is equated with mother, and only represents something to be fertilized.
Presumably, with the widespread acceptance of contraception, she is not only "something to be fertilized" but also includes relationships that without contraception might end with fertilization.
The Empress, historically, was the mother of the Emperor's heir; otherwise it was a business relationship designed to ensure peace or gain territory, money, or allies. The same was true for dukes and counts. However, the attraction of souls together with sexual allure, that of the second stage of the anima, is not excluded. Both, moreover, had the potential, as an inner figure projected onto another, to lead a person toward a deeper understanding of the unconscious aspects of the personality.
Since the third stage of anima development is "the spiritualization of
the mother," it, too, fits the Empress. It is the Virgin Mary as Mother
of God and intercessor with Christ for the forgiveness of sins. On the same level is Isis, wife of Osiris and mother of Horus. Horus, like Jesus, is an example of the positive mother-complex.
If Venus is associated with the Empress, it is in relation to her sons, particularly Cupid. In the story of Cupid and Psyche, she shows herself very possessive of Cupid, wanting to keep him from any serious relationship with a woman, and very jealous of his beloved Psyche. This Venus fits the occultists' cards more than the Tarot of Marseille. But any Empress card with a pretty young woman, such as that of the Cary Sheet, would qualify. I cannot see how Helen of Troy would fit the archetype, since there is no suggestion of motherliness in her story, in either Homer or Goethe.
Sometimes she is pictured as a dragon, guarding that indispensable treasure, the "pearl of great price." As such, she represents the devouring, aggressive unconscious nature which the Hero (symbolic humanity striving for consciousness) must slay in order to obtain the peal of wisdom transcending mere animal existence. Another familiar representation of the Terrible Mother aspect is Kali, the bloodthirsty wife of Shiva. . . . The devouring aspect of the goddess becomes apparent whenever woman neglects her true kingdom, which is relationship, and becomes power-hungry.
On the side of Hinduism, it must be pointed out that this is only one aspect of Kali, who also has positive features. In Greece, Hera frequently plays the role of the negative mother, or rather stepmother, in persecuting the children of Zeus conceived out of wedlock, such as Dionysus and Hercules.[54] In Greek legends and myth, there are also Circe, Calypso, Medea, Medusa, and Clytemnestra, among others. Of a slightly different sort is Jocasta, mother of Oedipus, who by ordering her infant son's death seeks to outwit the fate predicted for him, that he will marry his mother. Jung adds (CW vol. 9, part 1, pp. 15-16, "Evil symbols are the witch, the dragon (or any devouring and entwining animal, such as a large fish or a serpent), the grave, the sarcophagus, deep water, death, nightmares and bogies (Empusa, Lilith, etc.)."
Actually, even the Virgin Mary has a "terrible" aspect, in that the Church Fathers identified her with the cross. Augustine declared the cross to be his bride, while others identified the bride as Mary herself (
There is also such a thing as too much of the positive unconscious mother:[55]
Another empress type can swamp us, submerging our individuality in the saccharin sweetness of her unconscious lure. For example, Waite's boxom blond pictured with her couch and shield suggests this kind of Wagnerian music. One can almost hear the Venusberg music welling up from the pit to submerge and drown us, pulling us back into the womb. This tendency to smother-love is sometimes characteristic of the modern Empress type, especially in her role as Mom. It also appears in other areas, where the charm of such a woman can lure us into her realm in such a subtle way that we don't realize what's happened.
Demeter is another example, who stifles her daughter until she gets abducted by Hades and finds her own destiny. On the side of the son
In a modern alchemical interpretation, Robert Place declares the Empress to symbolize the element of Earth, whose separation as one of the four elements is achieved through dissolution of the original Prima Materia; she is also the vessel in which the Philosopher’s Stone will be created.[56]
An Empress is half of the pair that rules over the material and emotional side of the empire, as opposed to the spiritual. Since Jung is interested in healing the split between spirit and matter through the use of concepts taken from alchemy, she can be thought of as one aspect of a single archetype, that is, Sophia or Sapientia as spirit trapped in matter, but at the same time mother of the arcane substance, the uniting of the two, which can only take place in matter, i.e. the vicissitudes of life.
The eagle on the shield is an intrinsic part of the archetype, whether she be Venus, Isis, or Mary, as the mother is defined by her child, which is more than just the plants and animals on Waite's and Case's cards. The flexing of his muscles of his wing on the shield is a comic indication of his future prowess. In this regard he reflects what Jung calls "the positive
mother-complex in the son."
Jung points to two basic types of positive masculine mother-complex. A man may inherit a finely tuned Eros, sensitive to others, capable of great friendships and tact around others. On the other hand (CW 9 pt. 1, p. 21),
In the same way, what in its negative aspect is Don Juanism can appear positively as bold and resolute manliness; ambitious striving after the highest goals; opposition to all stupidity, narrow-mindedness, injustice, and laziness; willingness to make sacrifices for what is regarded as right, sometimes bordering on heroism; perseverance, inflexibility and toughness of will; a curiosity that does not shrink even from the riddles of the universe; and finally, a revolutionary spirit which strives to put a new face upon the world
As Venus, one of her children is Aeneas, the first Roman hero. Aeneas's son is Ascanio, mythical ancestor of the Visconti, rulers of Milan and defenders of the Empire. Another child, of course, is Cupid, the "eternal child" who sends his darts willy-nilly, often provoking mischief until he pricks himself and falls in love with Psyche, when by her transgression of his stipulation that she never look upon him, sees that he is not the dragon he was taken to be, undergoes suffering and, in accomplishing the tasks that Venus sets for her, redeems both of them. As Isis, her child is Horus, the pre-eminent Egyptian hero, who exacts vengeance against Osiris's evil brother Typhon/Seth and becomes the first pharaoh of a united Egypt. As Mary she is the mother of the Christian hero Jesus, whose glorious death is life to man. As the woman clothed with the sun, if it is Mary, she gives birth to him a second time.
In the Gnostic myths that Jung cites, Sophia has the role of "mother of all," creating the material world from her passions. To that extent she fits the Empress role. She also secretly works to order all things well, and to that extent rules the material world, jointly with Christ.
In alchemy Jung's fourth stage of anima development includes the prima materia's role as mother. In a text I quoted in relation to the Popess/Priestess, the "Shulamite," who never gets rid of her outer blackness, gives birth to the "old Adam," her sinful husband (as Eve), but also, in the form of an equation between the two, Adam Kadmon, the original unity, but now the fully realized human being (CW 14, para. 600, pp. 416-17):
By his equation "old Adam" = Adam Kadmon the author has contaminated two opposites. The interpretation of this passage must therefore be: from the black Shulamite comes forth the antiethesis "old Adam": Adam Kadmon. Her obvious connection with the earth as the mother of all living things makes it clear that her son was the sinful Adam, but not Adam Kadmon, who, as we have seen, is an emanation of En Soph. Nevertheless, by contaminating the two, the text makes both of them issue from the Shulamite.
The result is that the child is not the perfection envisioned by Christianity, nor the sinful "old Adam," but rather a kind of compromise (CW 14, para. 611, p. 424):
We cannot suppress the suspicion that, just as the blackness will not disappear, so the old Adam will not finally change. This may be the deeper reason why the expression "the old Adam" did not worry the author but, on the contrary, seemed just right. It is, unfortunately, far truer to say that a change for the better does not bring a total conversion of darkness into light and of evil into good, but, at most, is a compromise, in which the better slightly exceeds the worse.The new birth is the goal of "transformation which is bound up with conscious realization and the wholeness (individuation) it brings" rather than perfection.
5. Conclusion
The meaning of the card throughout its history can be summed up as "the
materialization of spirit,” or “giving birth”, with all the associations that
the agents of such an action may take, and also the reverse of that activity,
ascent to non-material form, ready once more to be hidden from view. The figure also conveys a
sense of the maternal virtues of care, compassion, and love, as well
as the relatively non-maternal value of female authority. The split between secular and spiritual heads of society was never very firm, in that the orb of world-encompassing authority was surmounted by a cross, and the Papacy also ruled a certain amount of territory, now limited to just Vatican City. With Jung's emphasis on Gnostic and alchemical examples, it is replaced by a single narrative with different emphases.
The overlay of the Kabbalist "Tree of the Sefiroth" onto the cards
adds a complexity that is sometimes with other meanings of the card, namely,
that of seeing her in terms of Understanding in a discursive, analytical sense.
The idea would seem to be that the Empress, as the Virgin giving birth to what
was previously hidden inside her, is like making explicit what was implicit in
the words of an allegorical text. Jung called this the "Logos" aspect
of consciousness, rational analysis. On the other hand, a mother's relationship
to her child is a form of Eros, love, and the way in which women traditionally
exercised power was in virtue of their relationships to others, as regents
until their son attained maturity, and even then as an overweening influence; coming from a different lineage than their husbands, they also were a symbol of peace between two families
or nations. In Jungian theory it is in fact not possible to analyze
a symbol by saying "what it stands for", but rather only
"circumambulate" the symbol, that is give other images and stories
that are related to the first, in other words, a kind of connection by Eros
rather than Logos.
[1] Emilia Maggio, "New Insights into the So-Called Alessandro Sforza Deck," The Playing Card, Vol. 44 No. 4 (April-June 2016), pp. 256-268, at http://www.academia.edu/25238482/New_Insights_into_the_So-called_Alessandro_Sforza_Deck.
[2] Imperatori: http://trionfi.com/imperatori-cards-ferrara-1423.
[3] Maggio (see here note 1), p. 259.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., p. 265. Durer, c. 1512, "Emperor Charlemagne and Emperor Sigismund," from Wikipedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Albrecht_Dürer_-_Emperor_Charlemagne_and_Emperor_Sigismund_-_WGA06997.jpg
[6] Maggio (see here note 1), p. 266
[7] The image is from the website of the Morgan Library, New York, which has the original in its collection.
[8] Dummett, note 6; images at https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh77bOOztOzQraK0v4qV-OksKlN6uNYPVADrUFnyVQYIXLNTrihkgkcKJeSyQTBXKu7Och6aTEA3LFMmshyiYa6e9ZoQxDbbqwHEO_1tN6VFZ_ek6dXdZuwxIWzDkpS5Zf1bc-zjd-zitp9/s1600/greenLoveKiQuKn.jpg
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensleeves. The suggestion might be that lying on the grass stains a woman’s clothes.
[10] Michael Dummett, The Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards (New York: Brazilier, 1986), p. 104.
[11] Andrea Vitali, "The Empress," http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=115#. See also http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02576b.htm and http://www.planetgast.net/symbols/symbolse/symbolse.html.
[12] Horapollo, Heiroglyphica (5th-century text circulating in Italy since 1419, first published 1505 Venice), entry for "hawk," http://www.sacred-texts.com/egy/hh/hh008.htm.
[13] Plutarch, Of Isis and Osiris (translations online), section 15 for Isis, 51 for Osiris.
[14] Francesco Colonna (attributed), Hypnerotomachia Porphilii, (Venice: Aldus Minutius, 1499).
[15] This sheet, from the early 16th century, is held by the National Museum in Budapest.
[16] The Rosenwald Sheet, early 16th century, is in the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., online at https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.41321.html. The Charles VI is in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris and online in Gallica, search “tarot de Charles VI.” It was originally thought to be done for King Charles VI of France, based on a misinterpretation of a document of that year. Thierry Depaulis in Le Tarot Révélé (La-Tour-de Peilz, Switzerland: Swiss Museum of Games, 2013), p. 21, dates it to “c. 1460” and “Florence (?).
[17] Accademia della Crusca, Grande dizionario della lingua italiano, entry papa, secondary meaning: “Il migliore, il più valente, il più stimato in una categoria di persone, in un gruppo social.”
[18] This deck is on Gallica, the website of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. The little numbers printed at the top of the cards are not original, and they follow the typical French order rather than that of Bologna.
[19] Giulio Cesare Croce, Lotto Festevole, fatto in Villa, Fra una nobil schiera di Cavalieri & di Dame, con i Trionfi de’ Tarrochi, esplicati in lode delle dette Dame, & altri bei trattenimenti da spasso (Bologna: Vittorio Benacci, 1602). Online in BUB Digitale, https://bub.unibo.it/it/bub-digitale/giulio-cesare-croce#lotto, from a copy in the Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio, Bologna.
[20] Nazario Renzoni, “Some remarks on Germini in Bronzino’s Capitolo in lode della Zanzara,” The Playing-Card 41, No.2 (Oct.-Dec. 2012), pp. 85–87: the Emperor and Pope are in a version of 1530-35, while the Empress is mentioned in a later version.
[22] Noblet: dating from Thierry Depaulis, Le Tarot Révélé (2013), p. 39; the unrestored original can be seen at http://www.tarot-history.com/Jean-Noblet/pages/lemperatrise.html. The Conver is at https://en.camoin.com/tarot/Tarot-Marseilles-Nicolas-Cnver-1760.html.
[23] See here note 12 and associated text.
[24]Gisele Lambert, in Les Premieres Gravures Italiennes (Paris: Bibliotheque Nationale, 1998) calls the artist "the Master of 1466."
[25] Antoine Court de Gébelin, "Du Jeu des Tarots," in Le Monde Primitif, analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne, vol. 8, Paris 1781. Online at http://www.tarock.info/gebelin.htm. Translation by David Tyson at https://docs11.minhateca.com.br/1186642872,BR,0,0,The-Game-of-Tarots%2C-by-Gebelin%2C-translated-by-Donald-Tyson.doc.
[26] Cards shown are from a 19th-century hand-painted version, which for these cards is very close to the original, as shown and described in Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis, and Michael Dummet, A Wicked Pack of Cards (London: Duckworth, 1996), plate 2 and p. 91. Correspondences to the Tarot of Marseille are on p. 86 of that book.
[27] Papus, The Divinatory Tarot, trans. Beryl Stockman; "Julia Orsini" (Simon Blocquel), L'Art deTirer les Cartes, Paris and Lille, 1838; my source is the copy in the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.)
[28] Eliphas Levi: Dogme et Rituele de la Haute Magie, tome 2 (Paris: Germer-Bailliere, 1861), 345. Online at https://archive.org/details/dogmeetrituelde01lvgoog
[29] Paul Christian, L'Homme Rouge des Tuileries, Paris 1863, pp. 88-89 of reprint (Guy Tredaniel, Paris 1977). Repeated in L'Histoire de la Magie, 1870, translated as History and Practice of Magic, trans James Kirkup and Julian Shaw (New York: Citidel Press, 1963), pp. 97-98.
[30] Apuleius, The Golden Ass, Jack Lindsey, trans. (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1962), p. 237.
[31] R. Falconnier, Les XXII Lames Hermétiques du Tarot Divinatoire ..., dessins de Mce. Otto Wegener (Paris: Librarie de l'Art Independant, 1896).
[32] Papus, The Tarot of the Bohemians, trans. A. P. Morton, rev. A. E. Waite,, 3rd ed.(Hollywood CA: Wilshire Book Co., n.d.), 116-117. Originally Le Tarot des Bohémiens, Paris, 1889.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Wirth's illustration is on p. 115 of Papus, note 21. The manuscript is the "Cloisters Manuscript: my source is http://www.ardanziger.com/2015/08/researching-and-sketching.html
[35]https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Albrecht_D%C3%BCrer,_Apocalypse_of_St_John,_The_Dragon_with_the_Seven_Heads.JPG.
[36] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binah_(Kabbalah). See also Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, p. 133.
[37] Oswald Wirth, The Tarot of the Magicians, trans. not given (York Beach ME: Weiser, 1980), p. 71. Originally Le Tarot des Imagiers du Moyen-Age, Paris, 1927
[38] Ibid, pp. 72-73
[39] Waite, Pictorial Key to the Tarot, II.2.iii, http://www.sacred-texts.com/tarot/pkt/pktar03.htm.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Etteilla, Maniere de se recréer avec le jeu de cartes nommées tarots, pour servir de premier Cahier a cet ouvrage (Paris, 1783), p. 58: "Le nombre 11 est le figure humain du peche," http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k622723/f13.item.r=pech. For "Garden of Eden," see my post on the Popess card.
[43] Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge MASS: MIT Press, 1988), p. 256. Originally De Re Aedificatoria, written c. 1450, Rome.
[44] Quoted in Horapollo, Hieroglyphica, trans. George Boas (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), translator's appendix, p. 103
[45] Hypnerotomachia Porphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream, trans. Joscelyn Godwin (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005), p. 41. Originally published in Venice by Aldus Manutius, 1499. Attributed to Francesco Colonna.and others.
[46] Cesare
Ripa: Iconologia, or Moral Emblems, trans. Pierce Tempest
(London: Benj. Motte, 1709), image 222, p. 58, at https://archive.org/details/iconologiaormora00ripa.
Image from 1611 Padua ed. in Italian, p. 374, online at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Personification_of_%27Nature%27_from_Cesare_Ripa%27s_%27Iconologia..%27_Wellcome_L0035391.jpg.
[47] Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, trans. Michael Chase, (Cambridge MASS: Harvard University Press, 2006) (in Google books).
[49] Waite of note 29.
[50] Great jubilee: Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, p. 463: "After 49,000 years. in the 'great jubilee' year, the entire creation returns to its origin in the womb of binah, 'the mother of the world.'"
[51] Sallie Nichols, Jung and Tarot, an archetypal Journey (York Beach: Weiser, 1980), p. 90.
[52] C.
G. Jung, The Psychology of the Transference, trans. R. F. C. Hull, in
Collected Works Vol. 16 (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966),
p. 161, paragraph 361.
[53] Nichols of note 41, p. 97.
[54] For Kali, Sekhmet, Tiamet, and Eris, see relevant Wikipedia articles online. Kali illustration from:https://www.ancient.eu/image/1332/.
[55] Nichols of note 37, p. 95
[56] Robert Place, The Alchemical Tarot (Saugerties NY: Hermes Publications, 2011), p. 156
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