The Empress
The Empress is card 3 of the Major Arcana, the figure of abundance and care. Readers traditionally take it as nurture, creativity and pleasure in the senses, the part of life that grows when it is looked after.
- Major Arcana
- Card 3
- Golden Dawn
- Venus
- Upright
- abundance, nurture, creativity, the senses
- Reversed
- smothering, creative block, self-neglect
Upright
Wheat ripens around her throne and a stream runs past it, so the card is nearly always read as growth: things tended until they flourish. It covers caring for others, making things, and taking real pleasure in food, comfort, beauty and the natural world.
Reversed
Readers who draw it reversed often look at where care has gone wrong. Sometimes it is given so freely that it smothers; sometimes the giver has nothing left for themselves. A creative block is the other common reading.
In love and at work
For a relationship, it usually points to warmth, affection and a home that feels good to be in. For work, readers link it with creative projects, caring professions, and any effort that needs patience before it pays back.
In the picture
Seated on cushions in a wheat field, she wears a crown of twelve stars and a gown printed with pomegranates. A heart-shaped shield by her side bears the symbol of Venus, and a waterfall and a stand of trees fill the background. The Golden Dawn assigned the card to Venus.
In a Caelumia profile
When The Empress comes up upright in a Caelumia reading, it counts toward these themes for that day, alongside the rest of the profile: Nurture, Imagination, Devotion.
Sources
- A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910). Waite's own guide to the deck he designed with Pamela Colman Smith, with each card's divinatory meanings.
- Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Book T: The Tarot (1890s, published by Israel Regardie in The Golden Dawn (1937 to 1940)). The source of the planetary, zodiac and elemental attributions of the cards.
Updated September 28, 2026.
See it in your own profile
Caelumia reads your whole birth chart and your numbers together, and shows where they agree. Your profile is free to start, and your first results appear while you answer.