The Empress: grain ahead, water behind

Start with the picture: a star crown, a Venus shield, grain ahead and water behind

Waite opens the Empress with a sense of presence: a stately figure, seated, having rich vestments and a royal aspect, as of a daughter of heaven and earth. Her diadem is of twelve stars, gathered in a cluster. The symbol of Venus is on the shield which rests near her, and the sceptre she bears is surmounted by the globe of this world. A field of corn is ripening in front of her, and beyond there is a fall of water.

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The Empress: BaZiFlow's card with three prompts

On the Rider-Waite-Smith original, these are the points worth checking with your own eyes: the Roman numeral III at the top and a yellow sky; a star crown, and a staff topped with a round globe raised in one hand; a heart-shaped shield leaning beside her with the Venus sign (a circle over a cross) on it; a broad field of golden stalks at her feet, and woods and a falling stream at the right. In Waite's order the picture has three places: the crown above, the staff and shield at hand, and around her the grain in front and the water behind.

What Waite lists: fruitfulness and action, and a dark half on the same line

The Empress's divinatory meaning is: fruitfulness, action, initiative, length of days; the unknown, clandestine; also difficulty, doubt, ignorance. Reversed: light, truth, the unravelling of involved matters, public rejoicings; according to another reading, vacillation.

Fruitfulness, action, initiative, length of days; the unknown, clandestine; also difficulty, doubt, ignorance. Reversed: Light, truth, the unravelling of involved matters, public rejoicings.

The upright line's second half stays in the dark: clandestine, doubt, ignorance. The first reversed words read like an answer to it: light, truth, the unravelling of involved matters, plus public rejoicings, all of them bringing things into the open. Only the other reading, vacillation, turns against the first half's initiative. So the reversed Empress reads less like abundance lost and more like a list of things made clear.

Star crown, Venus shield, grain and water: what Waite wrote

Part II on the Empress is not short. Waite calls her the inferior Garden of Eden, the Earthly Paradise, all that is symbolized by the visible house of man; the fruitful mother of thousands; above all things universal fecundity and the outer sense of the Word. He remarks that no direct message has been given to man like that borne by woman, though she does not herself carry its interpretation.

Waite also sets out a quite specific structure: the Empress is the door, and people enter this life by her; the way which leads out of it, into that which is beyond, is the secret known to the High Priestess. That puts two neighboring cards at the two ends of one road: one for the entrance, one for the exit.

How to read it: the grain, the water and the part not yet yellow

The picture is already a counting sheet: the grain close by can be seen, the part not yet yellow reminds you that it is still growing, and the far water is the source that keeps feeding them. Carried over to learning a new skill, these three places become three questions.

1. 1

   The grain at hand: what is already gathered?

   Write only what you can show someone: songs you can play through, chords you can hold cleanly, days of practice completed. What can be counted counts as gathered.

2. 2

   The part not yet yellow: what is still growing?

   Waite writes "ripening". List the half-done things separately and estimate roughly how many weeks they still need, without folding them into "already know".

3. 3

   The distant water: what keeps supplying?

   A weekly lesson, a fixed practice slot, a course you can follow. If the water stops, both earlier columns stop, so write it down on its own.

An example: you have practiced the ukulele daily for six weeks. The three questions split "how am I doing" into three columns:

Reversed and neighboring cards: light and truth, and three cards on "entrance" and "plenty"

The reversed Empress is a surprise, a column turned toward the open:

Light, truth, the unravelling of involved matters, public rejoicings; according to another reading, vacillation.

The "other reading", vacillation, is the only leaning-negative word in the whole reversed list; say which reading you use.