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The Baroque Tarot- Key 3- The Empress
The Thoth Tarot — ATU 3: The Empress
The Baroque Tarot — Key 3: The Empress
“I am the love of Being, that creates being, so I can be intimate with the dream as ‘other’ and/or lover.”
—Eli
The Empress of Tarot is the Universal Womb in which all manifestation is conceived, gestated, nourished, and brought into visible form. In the Western Hermetic Qabalah, she is the Path of Daleth, meaning Door, and she spans the Supernal path between Chokmah, Wisdom, the All-Father current, and Binah, Understanding, the All-Mother current.
Daleth is the Gate of Heaven, the sacred threshold through which the One becomes the Many. She is the door by which the invisible becomes visible, the unspoken becomes image, and the dream of Spirit becomes the living body of Nature.
This is why I call the Empress “the Womb with a View.” She is the power of Imagination and Intuition: the Universal Mother who takes thought, feeling, desire, and wisdom and gestates them into worlds.
The Empress as Love with Wisdom
In the Thoth Tarot, ATU 3 — The Empress is the universal principle of Love with Wisdom. She is our ability to extend love and receive love. She is not sentimental affection alone, but the great cosmic law of attraction by which all forms are drawn into relationship.
Love is not merely a human emotion. Human emotion is a small wave rising from the infinite Ocean of the Universal Collective Unconscious. Love is the formative power of existence itself. To seek love as if it were outside of us is to forget that we are already Love creating itself as reflection, offspring, lover, and “other.”
The Empress teaches:
I AM Love becoming form, so Being may know itself intimately.
The Anima and the Inner Feminine
In Jungian psychology, the Empress corresponds strongly to the Anima, the unconscious feminine nature within a man. The Anima acts as a bridge between the conscious mind and the deeper layers of psyche. She appears in dreams, fantasies, projections, emotions, intuition, and relationships.
Jung described the Anima as evolving through stages often symbolized as Eve, Helen, Mary, and Sophia: from biological attraction, to romantic ideal, to spiritual devotion, and finally to Wisdom.
For the male initiate, the Anima is not merely an inner image of woman. She is the guide into the dark womb of the unconscious. No man becomes a true Magus until She takes him below the surface of his heroic self-image and initiates him into the Divine Feminine.
His-Story and Her-Story
His-story is often the outside world of competition, conquest, ordeal, and the hero’s journey. Her-story is the inner world of love, emotion, intuition, descent, healing, and the heroine’s journey.
The masculine path often seeks victory through division, will, and achievement. The feminine path seeks wholeness through descent, feeling, surrender, and integration. One cannot truly understand the Feminine by observation alone. It must be experienced as an inner journey.
The Heroine’s Journey is not about conquering the world. It is about recovering the lost, wounded, exiled, or denied aspects of the soul. It is the descent into the psychic underworld, the confrontation with grief and shadow, and the return with integrated wisdom.
Inanna, Ereshkigal, and the Descent
The Empress is not only the soft Mother of beauty and fertility. She is also the terrible womb of initiation. Like the Sumerian Inanna, the soul must descend into the underworld and meet its own Ereshkigal, the dark sister, the rejected Queen of the depths.
In this descent, the false self is stripped away. The personality is undressed of its masks, titles, vanities, and defensive illusions. This is the dark womb-initiation of the Anima. The outer self dies, and what returns is no longer divided.
The initiate descends as “I,” but returns as We.
This is the mystery of the lemniscate: 0 = 2. Being becomes two in order to love itself as other, and then reunites as the Divine Androgyne.
Daleth: The Door Between Chokmah and Binah
The Qabalistic Tarot attributes the Empress to Daleth, the Hebrew letter meaning Door, and to the planet Venus. Daleth unites Chokmah and Binah, Wisdom and Understanding, the All-Father and All-Mother.
Although Chokmah is numbered second and Binah third, this does not mean one “came before” the other in ordinary time. In the Supernal Triangle, Chokmah and Binah are simultaneous polarities of the One. When Kether becomes “I AM,” it does so through the inseparable union of Wisdom and Understanding.
Thus, the Empress is not simply feminine as opposed to masculine. She is the magnetic womb of relationship through which masculine expression and feminine reception become creation.
Venus and the Formula of Creation
On the Thoth Empress card, the symbol of Venus appears, and Venus is the only planetary symbol that may be understood as encompassing the whole Tree of Life. This reveals a profound doctrine:
The fundamental formula of universal creation is Love.
Love is the Law of Attraction. Love draws force into form, idea into image, spirit into body, and Self into relationship. Venus is therefore not merely romance or beauty. Venus is the cosmic power that says: “Let there be relationship.”
The Empress is both subjective and objective. As a Supernal Path, she is the highest Venusian mystery. As Netzach, Venus becomes the emotional, astral, and desire-nature of the personality. Above the Abyss, Venus is cosmic Love. Below the Abyss, Venus becomes feeling, attraction, beauty, desire, art, and devotion.
The Moon, the Lotus, and the Feminine Current
On the Thoth Empress card, the waxing and waning moons represent her dual faces: Life and Death, increase and decrease, birth and return. The Moon is the Western symbol of feminine-magnetic nature, receptive to the solar-electric force.
The blue lotus on the card is an Eastern symbol of wisdom. It roots in the dark earth beneath the waters, rises through the deep, and opens its petals to the Sun. This is the mystery of the Holy Grail: the womb that receives the solar blood of Spirit and transforms it into living wisdom.
The lotus is also the chalice. It is Isis, Hathor, Mary, Venus, and the Grail-Mother in symbolic form.
The Pelican and the Blood of the Mother
The Pelican feeding her young from the blood of her own breast is one of the most powerful symbols on the Thoth Empress card. It represents the Great Mother nourishing creation from her own heart-blood.
Our flesh is made from Mother’s blood. Our blood is born from Mother’s blood. Even the male body is formed in and from the maternal current. Therefore, the Empress reminds us that all bodies are children of the Great Womb.
The mother’s love is not weak. It is sacrificial, sustaining, and cosmic. Life feeds life from its own heart.
The Alchemical Salt
The Empress is also the alchemical Salt, one of the three great principles of alchemy, alongside Mercury and Sulfur. Salt is the receptive body of Nature, the matrix or womb that must be stirred by the fiery principle of Sulfur and animated by the fluid intelligence of Mercury.
Salt is not dead matter. It is the hidden body of manifestation. It is the field of form, the place where Spirit coagulates into experience.
In the Thoth Empress, the shape of her body and arms suggests this alchemical Salt principle. She is the body of Nature, the womb-egg, the inactive fullness that contains all possibility until awakened by the electric impulse of Spirit.
Hathor, Isis, and the Mother of Stars
The Empress may also be seen as Hathor, the Egyptian cow goddess, whose celestial body nourishes the heavens and from whose milk flows the Milky Way. She is also Isis, holding the lotus, the passive power that contains, conceives, and resurrects.
Her throne uprights suggest blue twisted flames, indicating her birth from Water, the feminine magnetic element. The sparrow and dove, sacred birds of Venus, perch near her. Her robe contains bees, dominoes, spirals, and the girdle of the Zodiac, showing that she is the Queen of generative pattern.
Beneath her throne are symbols of the First Matter, the Secret Rose, fishes, and the Grail-current of the ancient Ocean Mother. She is Rose-Mari, the Sea-Womb, the matrix of earthly and celestial life.
Sheela Na Gig and the Vulvic Gate
The medieval figure of Sheela Na Gig, especially found in Ireland and parts of Europe, belongs to this same mystery of the Empress. Her exposed vulva is not merely sexual. It is the ancient Gate of Birth, Death, Protection, and Initiation.
To the parapsychologist and metaphysician, Sheela Na Gig represents the threshold into the deepest layers of the unconscious. Entering the vulvic gate, the false outward self dies. Emerging from it, wisdom is born.
She is terrifying because all true birth is terrifying. She is sacred because all life must pass through mystery.
The Empress and the Emperor
The Empress is the complement of ATU 4 — The Emperor. In the Thoth Tarot, they face one another, showing that their mysteries are inseparable. However, the Empress is more macrocosmic and universal, while the Emperor is more microcosmic, structural, and material.
The Empress is the womb of possibility.
The Emperor is the ordering power of manifestation.
She gestates.
He defines.
She is the ocean.
He is the law that channels the river.
Yet neither is whole without the other. Creation requires both reception and expression, both love and will, both womb and word.
The Baroque Tarot — Key 3: The Empress
The Baroque Tarot Empress presents the archetype of the Great Mother in a visibly regal, earthly, and maternal form. She is the Queen of fertility, beauty, abundance, sensuality, and natural increase. Where the Thoth Empress reveals the occult machinery of Venus, Daleth, and the Universal Womb, the Baroque Empress displays the noble Mother of manifested life.
Her throne represents the abundance of fruitful Nature, the kingdom of form made fertile by Love. Her mysterious regal expression suggests that she is not merely a mother of bodies, but a keeper of hidden wisdom. She knows the secret laws by which life is conceived, nourished, protected, and brought into beauty.
In her right hand she appears to hold what resembles a sword, suggesting discernment, protection, and sovereign authority. This is important, for the Empress is not passive. She is receptive, but not weak. She is the magnetic intelligence that receives Spirit and gives it form. Her sword-like symbol may be read as the power to distinguish what shall be nurtured from what must be cut away.
Her robes of red and blue suggest the union of polar powers. The red recalls the fiery authority of the Emperor and Aries: action, passion, blood, and creative force. The blue suggests Venus, water, receptivity, emotion, and the deep magnetic field of the Feminine. Thus, even in the Baroque image, the Empress is the equilibrium of fire and water, will and womb, passion and peace.
Around her throat is the symbol of Venus, showing that her voice, breath, and word are ruled by Love. The throat is the place of vibration and expression; therefore, Venus at the throat implies that the Empress speaks creation through harmony, attraction, beauty, and relational intelligence. She is Love made articulate.
Upright Meaning:
Upright, the Baroque Empress suggests intuition, emotional intelligence, beauty, fertility, and mystery. She encourages you to trust your inner knowing and seek Gnosis beyond the surface of appearances. Her lunar quality aligns her with emotion, dream, rhythm, and the psychic tides of the soul.
She may indicate a time of creativity, nurturing, sensual renewal, or spiritual receptivity. In Western Hermetic Qabalah, she reminds us that true knowledge is not merely intellectual. It must be received, gestated, embodied, and lived.
Reversed Meaning:
Reversed, the Empress may suggest emotional imbalance, hidden truths, creative blockage, or a disconnection from inner wisdom. She can point to unrevealed secrets, misunderstood feelings, or a refusal to listen to intuition.
This reversal may also show that one is either over-nurturing others while neglecting oneself, or closing the heart so completely that love cannot circulate. The remedy is to return to the inner womb of silence, where emotion becomes wisdom rather than confusion.
Comparison with the Thoth Empress
The Thoth Empress is the cosmic Venus: the Path of Daleth, the Door between Chokmah and Binah, the Universal Womb that births worlds through Love. The Baroque Empress is Venus enthroned in visible Nature: fertile, regal, embodied, and maternal.
The Thoth card reveals the metaphysical formula: Love is the law of manifestation.
The Baroque card reveals the earthly result: Life becomes beautiful when Love rules form.
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