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
The Morgan Library & Museum in New York has an Empress among its Visconti-Sforza tarot cards, painted in Milan about 1450–1480 and attributed to Bonifacio Bembo. They belong to what the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo calls the Colleoni deck: 74 cards, now divided between the Carrara, the Morgan and a private collection, which the Carrara brought together for an exhibition in 2026. Papus joined the card to the third Hebrew letter, Gimel. A nineteenth-century Milanese pack in the British Museum titles it L'Imperatrice. Most packs print the titles in French, the museum's 1876 catalogue notes, and spell them badly: the Empress is often Limperatrise.
Full face or profile
Waite noted that the Empress is sometimes drawn full face while the Emperor is in profile, and said the difference "carries no inner meaning". Court de Gébelin, who took the tarot for an Egyptian book, read the pair as queen and king, each with an eagle on a shield and a sceptre topped by a globe and cross. Waite's Empress has the sign of Venus on her shield instead.
Where the Empress was dropped
In the tarocchino of Bologna, a pack in the British Museum has four "Moor's heads or satraps" in place of the Emperor, Empress, Pope and Popess. Romain Merlin, quoted in the museum's catalogue, thought the change probably came after 1513, when Bologna acknowledged the Pope's sovereignty.
Read next
- Next in Tarot cardsThe EmperorTrump IV of the tarot: a crowned king on a throne. A. E. Waite read it as stability, power and authority.
- 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 Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Hierophant, 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 Empress (Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards), The Morgan Library & Museum, New York (Wayback Machine copy, 17 June 2026), MS M.630 (no. 2)
- TAROCCHI. Le origini, le carte, la fortuna, Exhibition, 27 February to 2 June 2026, curated by Paolo Plebani, Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, exhibition page
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles, 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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