The Empress
Tarot card meaning, upright and reversed
What it means
Upright
The Empress is read as abundance and care: growth, the body, creation and nurture. Waite listed fruitfulness, action and initiative.
Reversed
Reversed, readers point to creative block, neglect of yourself, or care that smothers. Waite gave vacillation, and also the unravelling of tangled matters.
In love
Fertility, sensuality, nurturing love, pregnancy possible.
In work
Creative projects flourish, abundance, growth.
What is drawn on the card
A crowned woman sits at ease on cushions in a field of ripe wheat, a forest and a waterfall behind her. Her gown is printed with pomegranates; she wears a crown of twelve stars and holds a scepter, and a heart-shaped shield bearing the sign of Venus rests beside her.
As Pamela Colman Smith drew it in 1909. Our paintings follow these scenes.
- Hebrew letter
- Daleth
- Planet
- Venus
The letter and sign are 19th-century occult attributions (Golden Dawn), not part of the card’s origin.
Where the card comes from
- Tarot began as a card game in 15th-century Italy. The earliest record is from Florence in 1440, and the game is still played today in France, Austria and Bologna.
- Reading the cards for fortunes is documented from Bologna around 1750, with ordinary playing decks.
- In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin wrote that the cards came from ancient Egypt. There is no evidence for it, and he wrote before anyone could read hieroglyphs (1822).
- The Hebrew letters and astrological signs on each card are 19th-century French and English occult attributions; the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1888) fixed the set most readers use.
- The scenes follow the 1909 Waite–Smith deck, designed by A. E. Waite and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith. The Innerverse cards are our own paintings of those scenes.
Sources: Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (1980); Morgan Library & Museum, Visconti-Sforza tarot, MS M.630; Court de Gébelin, Le Monde primitif, vol. VIII (Paris, 1781); A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911).
Draw your own card
The Empress is one of 78. Draw one card or a three-card spread in the Innerverse, read with the same art and the same sources, free.
Or make it daily: one card each morning, with a private note →Want the whole deck? All 78 cards and the guidebook.
Traditional readings, presented as tarot readers have held them. They are a record of a practice, not a prediction.