The Empress
Trump III of the tarot: a crowned woman seated among ripening corn. A. E. Waite read it as fruitfulness.
Meaning
Waite's Empress is "a stately figure, seated", crowned with twelve stars, with the symbol of Venus on a shield beside her, a field of corn ripening before her and a waterfall beyond. He called her "universal fecundity". She is the partner of the Emperor, the next card.
What does the Empress card mean?
Waite's meanings are "fruitfulness, action, initiative, length of days", and also "difficulty, doubt, ignorance"; reversed, "light, truth, the unravelling of involved matters, public rejoicings".
In older decks
Papus joined the card to the third Hebrew letter, Gimel. A nineteenth-century Milanese pack in the British Museum titles it L'Imperatrice.
See also
The Emperor, The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Emperor, The Hierophant.
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
Last reviewed September 27, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research