The Emperor
Trump IV of the tarot: a crowned king on a throne. A. E. Waite read it as stability, power and authority.
Meaning
Waite describes the Emperor seated on a throne whose arms are fronted by rams' heads, holding a sceptre in the form of the crux ansata, the looped cross, and a globe. He called the Emperor, "by imputation the spouse" of the Empress, the power of this world.
What does the Emperor card mean?
Waite's meanings are "stability, power, protection, realization; a great person", and also "authority and will"; reversed, "benevolence, compassion, credit; also confusion to enemies, obstruction, immaturity".
In older decks
Papus joined the card to the fourth Hebrew letter, Daleth. Waite left the Hebrew letters out of his book, partly because, he wrote, "nearly every attribution is wrong". The Milanese pack in the British Museum, from the nineteenth century, calls him L'Imperatore. Waite noted that the Emperor is sometimes shown wearing "the stars or ribbons of some order of chivalry", which to him showed that "the cards are a medley of old and new emblems".
The Emperor and the Mantegna cards
Romain Merlin, quoted in the British Museum's 1876 catalogue, matched L'Empereur with Imperator, number 9 of the engraved Italian series called the Mantegna cards, one of fifteen tarot figures he traced to that series. Waite agreed that the Emperor is "common to the Mantegna and Trumps Major", but did not believe the Mantegna sequence "gave birth" to the tarot.
Two emperors, or none
Bologna's tarocchino went both ways. A pack in the British Museum replaces the Emperor, Empress, Pope and Popess with four Moors, a change Merlin dated, probably, to after 1513, when Bologna acknowledged the Pope's sovereignty. The engraved tarocchino of Giuseppe Maria Mitelli (1634–1718), of which the museum has three sets, has two emperors instead, one bearded and one beardless.
Read next
- Next in Tarot cardsThe HierophantTrump V of the tarot: a priest in a triple crown between two pillars. Older decks called him the Pope.
- The same shape in Christian symbolsINRIINRI are the initials of the Latin for “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”, the charge the Gospel of John says Pilate had fixed to Christ’s cross. Crucifixes in the Western churches show the four letters on a small board above his head.
See also
The Empress, The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Lovers, The Chariot.
Sources
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A. E. Waite, William Rider & Son, London, 1910 (the sacred-texts.com transcription, on the Internet Archive), The Trumps Major; The Greater Arcana and their Divinatory Meanings
- The Tarot of the Bohemians, by Papus, Chapman & Hall, London, 1896, translated by A. P. Morton (scan on the Internet Archive), The Symbolical Tarot
- A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and Other Cards in the British Museum, by W. H. Willshire, Trustees of the British Museum, London, 1876 (scan on the Internet Archive), Italian tarots, second quarter of the nineteenth century, Milan
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from crosses, letters and numbers or squares and rectangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 3, 2026. How we research
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