The Empress.
The work was done a season ago.
Upright, then reversed, as Waite gave them in 1910.
She is on cushions in a field of ripe wheat, a waterfall coming down through trees behind her. Twelve stars in a circle on her head, a sceptre in one hand. A grey heart-shaped shield leans against the cushions at her feet.
She is sitting in the middle of her own harvest. The wheat was sown a season ago, the water was running before she arrived, and nothing is being defended. What is being asked of you is the harder half, which is to stop working and let it come in.
Four things people go to on this card
- the wheat
You went to the field. Ripe wheat, right up to the edge of the cushions.
Something that has been growing for months is now ready, and she is sitting down. That is the whole composition. The labour is out of frame and behind her, and what is in frame is a woman not working.
Harvest is not a reward for effort and it does not respond to more of it. There is something in your life that is ready and you are still tending it, because tending is the part you know how to do. Cut it and bring it in.
What is ready that you are still tending instead of taking?
- the waterfall
The water caught you. A fall coming down behind her through the trees, running the whole time.
A supply that does not stop and did not need arranging. Everything in this picture is fed from upstream, and nobody in the frame is managing the upstream part. She did not build the waterfall. She sat where it was.
That is the hardest idea in the card for anyone used to producing. Something in your life is currently being kept going by a source you neither control nor set up, and you have not thanked it because you have not noticed it. The noticing is the whole instruction.
What in your life is being fed by something you neither control nor arranged?
- the shield
You picked the shield. Heart-shaped, grey, propped against the cushions and not on her arm.
A defence that has been put down. It is on the ground beside her, within reach, and she is sitting in front of it at ease. Nothing about the posture suggests she expects to need it this afternoon.
The abundance in this card depends entirely on that. Nothing grows in a defended position, and the wheat is the proof. Work out what you would have to set down for the thing you want to be able to reach you, and then notice that you have been calling it protection.
What would you have to put down for this to be able to arrive?
- her crown
The stars are where you went. Twelve of them, in a circle, on a woman reclining in a field.
Something enormous set in a completely ordinary place. Twelve is the whole year, the full circuit, the largest count the deck uses, and it is sitting on the head of somebody lying back in a crop that is not yet cut.
That is the argument of this card. The biggest cycle you are part of is not somewhere else and will not announce itself. It is the season you are actually sitting in, and you have been treating it as the gap before the important part.
What ordinary stretch of your life right now is the important part, and are you treating it as an interval?
On the Tree of Life, The Empress is the fourteenth path, Daleth, from Chokmah to Binah, in the Golden Dawn's attribution (Liber 777).
Draw a card, and if this one turns, press whichever of these four you went to and the reading is written from there instead. Pulled it in a spread of your own? Read the whole spread here.