(from the Herbcrafter’s Tarot by Latisha Guthrie and Joanna Powell Colbert)
Roses are such an interesting plant/flower to choose for the Empress, because they present such different ways. Roses have a huge place in our iconography of romance, but they’re carefully groomed, meticulously moving from bud to tight full rose. Different colours mean different things, carefully worked out by Victorians obsessed with systematization. Which could be one side of the Empress, if we’re painting her as control like the Emperor, just in a different, more stereotypically “feminine” way.
But then you see roses out in the world. You notice how gloriously messy they are, how wild, how the blooms burst off in all directions, nothing carefully manicured about them. They smell delightful, they drop petals everywhere, you have to deadhead them constantly if you want them to continue to bloom. I walked by a rosebush last week that was positively bursting with rose hips, and was tempted to do some urban foraging – except it was on someone’s lawn, and I’m not that audacious.
When we sit down with the Empress card, we also have to sit down with her counterpart, the Emperor, and examine how we see the two cards differently. The control of the Emperor is clear, his power exerted through hierarchy and orders from the top. What, in contrast, is the Empress? If the Emperor is urban spaces, the Empress is nature, where power exists in abundance but looks very different. It’s wilder, more unpredictable, full of overgrowth and hidden treasures as well as hidden brambles. It’s storms and quiet glades, all at once.
Over time, this is where my take on the Empress has drifted. Not as an emblem of worldly female power, but of the power that surrounds us that we barely acknowledge – although in this age, the effects of climate change are becoming more and more obvious. The Empress is power, she is abundance, she is fertility – but she is all of those things in good and bad ways, and in ways that exist outside dichotomies of good and bad.
It’s one of those things I have to grapple with as a pagan – that nature is soul-filling, exhilarating, worthy of veneration, and yet also destructive, random, cruel. The rose gives us beauty, gives us vitamin C if we collect those rosehips, and hides thorns that make grasping it a risky move. Here, we see it around a honeycomb heart – another bounty of nature that can come with a sting. The Empress is abundance, but she is also wild, and where she sits out in her wildness, she can match the Emperor in his cities any day.
https://sanddollartarot.ca/2024/10/21/card-of-the-week-the-empress/
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Nina Zina
Sand Dollar Tarot
