The Empress

✦ Associations

Earth / Venus

✦ Keywords

The wisdom of the body and nature, sensual pleasure, nurture, fertility, abundance, creativity.

✦ Quote

Pleasure is the point. Feeling good is not frivolous, it is freedom. — Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Activism Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare. — Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light and Other Essays

✦ Meaning:

✦ Imagery of life and nature

The Empress is the seed and the sapling, the nectar-wet bloom and the fallen fruit, the brittle leaf and the nurse log suckling its host of grubs and fungus. The Empress is nature and the body which is part of nature, the body before it learned to be ashamed. Here, we meet the rhythmic insistent pulse of life itself; we feel it in our veins, and we recognize it as our own.

✦ Embodiment and sensual awareness

The Empress invites us into our body's own instinctual wisdom, into sensual awareness, and into the embodiment of the good, sweet earth of our flesh. They know that the body is the house of the soul in this lifetime, the beautiful and complicated organism through which we experience all pleasure and pain and agony and ecstasy. Bodies are not always easy to live in, the Empress knows—oh do they know—but bodies are what make us alive.

✦ Struggles with embodiment

For those of us who struggle with our bodies, whether due to matters of health, disability, gender dysphoria, trauma, societal conditioning, or otherwise, the Empress can see a difficult archetype. The invitation to embodiment is pitted with obstacles, fraught with terrors; dissociating from our bodies can be far easier and more pleasurable than embodying them.

✦ Gateways to reclamation

But for us, the Empress may be even more vital, for they may offer unexpected gateways into our own becoming. Perhaps it's the magic of adornment—eyelashes and extensions, tattoos and piercings, packers and push-ups—all methods of reclaiming the body through self-expression and/or self-adoration. Maybe it's the rebellion of loving your body just as it is despite the pressures of culture, the concerning shaming of family, the judgmental glances of strangers. Maybe it's in fact the right to claim ownership over your own body and to surgically and/or medically change it however you wish in order to affirm your gender. Or maybe it's just the bare simplicity of closing your eyes, listening to your blood, feeling your breath, and knowing for a pure perfect moment the rightness of your existence on this earth.

✦ Mythology and symbols

The Empress has long been identified with creator-goddexx of the earth, agriculture, and fertility, here represented by the sacred wheat of Demeter/Ceres and by the 12-starred crown of the creator of the heavens, which is also the zodiac and time. But this nurturing Empress of the fields and seasons is only one side of the archetype, for they are also linked to Aphrodite, Venus, Astarte, Inanna, deities of sex, death, pleasure, and raw sensual experience, represented here by the scythe that reaps and the luscious cracked pomegranate.

✦ Ritual of pleasure

"All acts of love and pleasure are My rituals," declares the Charge of the Goddess, and indeed the Empress asks us to worship the divine creative and destructor force that thrums through all life by worshiping our own sensuous bodies, which are life itself.

✦ Organic creativity

The Empress is nature, the meiotic cradle from which all life, all art, all beauty, all new things are born. The Magician represents creation through focused will, but the Empress embodies natural, organic creation. They create not because they have willed it but because it is in them, it is natural, they are ripe with it. The Empress is the poem that tears from you like a gale, the painting that paints itself while you hold the brush, the song that you heard in a dream before you plucked the chords. Like the skin of a ripe fruit splitting to spill its juices, we create because we are opened by it. The sweet spills forth, abundant with seeds.

✦ Number three and growth

The Empress is number 3, the pistol and the stamen and the budding fruit, the germination of the non-binary, the number of natural growth and expansion. The Empress knows the most intelligent thing on Earth is the earth itself, is nature with its mycelium technology, its adaptive queer diversity, its never-ending organic creativity constantly rebirthing itself anew. Create yourself, the Empress decrees, and worship your creation.

✦ Goddexx usage

* I use the term 'goddexx' in two ways: 1) as a non-gendered term for the divine (rather than the gendered 'god' or 'goddess'), and 2) to denote a specifically queer divinity—not a divine feminine nor a divine masculine, but a divine queer.