Letter: G = Venus
Path: Between Chakhmah and Chesed
Quality: Wealth
The Empress is the compassionate and generous web of life envisioned by Godhead to provide vehicles for all the sparks that wish to enter the Creation. The principle of Venus is that of attraction, harmony, magnetism, charisma, and sympathetic resonance.
Venus binds all souls and species together through mutual reliance and interlocking function. She is also the patient gardener of Eden, looking for the best conditions for every species. Therefore, she has been known as the Engine of Nature. The Empress points to the Great Mother aspect of Sophia, wife of the King of the realm of Light.
It is she who originally granted Anthropos the spark of divinity that animates him and shows forth his heavenly lineage. She sends a letter in the form of an eagle to her son who has forgotten himself and is slumbering in world’s distractions. This is the goddess of Nature and giver of life to all, without whom the seeker is lost.
This would be the Mariological goddess of Paracelsus, the feminine side of the Father from whom the earthly Virgin Mary was reflected when it was time for Christ to be born. Major Arcanum 3 provides the mediating third term for our first trine of Light, supporting the creative and generative functions of the Magus in fertilizing the meditative stillness and sensitivity of the Priestess.
The Empress balances these energies this through her power of Love and Eros Magic, the attractive force that everywhere enlivens Nature. Boehme would call this quality “the magic of nature.” The Empress evokes and nurtures life in the Earth plane; as the Holy Mother she sponsors every incarnation as microcosmic fractals of the One.
She’s the Mother of all the plants and animals, the inspiration for all the lifeforms on Earth, whose great magnetism attracts souls to occupy the bodies she calls forth from the mud. As the face of the planetary Goddess, she reveals herself through the vital and effulgent tissue of Earth, which sprouts infinite forms under her tender attentions.
Once we accept her tutelage, we learn what each manifestation is intended for, what purpose each life-form serves in the overall fabric of Creation. The Empress powers the ecological web made of all the creatures that arise within it. She tends to the harmony, the interpenetration, the mutuality of the species as they hold each other in place. She does her work by evoking universal attraction, multidirectional brotherhood and sisterhood. Without the strong family bonds she forges between species, the web would fail. No individual consciousness, no matter how well-cultivated, can in any way affect the laws by which matter is structured.
However, we can harness our growing understanding to what Nature herself already wants to accomplish. Paying attention to Nature’s ways and responding to her requirements evokes the creative imagination out of which all of humanity’s inventions and productions flow. Wherever she stands, the Empress organizes the lives around her according to her generous dictates of love and support, affinity and bonding, encouragement and opportunity.
We have only to emulate the Empress to thrive. Academic tradition tells that Venus is the patroness of the academic art of Rhetoric because Venus is the most beautiful of the visible planets. Her visible brilliancy of aspect symbolizes the rhetorician’s concern for style and taste, always presenting attractive combinations the same way poets labor to decorate their verse. But beauty for its own sake is not the issue with the Empress. In modern life the appearance of beauty can be simulated even in contexts where the traditional virtues are lacking.
With the Empress we are beyond artifice and appearances, relying on direct insight granted by clairvoyance. Our Empress radiates an invisible emanation which awakens the internal memory of Divine Intention, instilled at the Creation of this world. This is the Light of “natural reason” by which humans perceive Wisdom even in this transitory realm of deceiving appearances. In the words of medieval exegete Guiseppe Mazzotta, “[Dante’s] term, ‘chiarezza’.., translates claritas, the light that St. Thomas Aquinas conceives to be the substance of beauty and the means of its disclosure” (Bloom, 1986, p. 189).
He also suggests that “for Dante, memory is the visionary faculty, the imagination through which the poet can question the phenomena of natural existence and urge them to release their hidden secrets” (p. 193-4). In the Light of Venus (the Empress), the things of this world show themselves as they really are, allowing us access to their original ideal.
The above text is an excerpt from our book Tarot of the Holy Light: A Continental Esoteric Tarot - Volume One.
