Making Sense of the Empress and Emperor cards
When I was making my tarot deck, the SparkTarot®, I changed some of the card names. I didn’t do this lightly, but some of the cards had names that were either a bit triggering, like The Devil or Death, for example, and others were just not as easy to read, like The Hierophant, The Hermit, or The Emperor.
Those names might have made more sense to the people of the past, and the archetype they represent remains the same, so why not make it easier to understand for today’s world?
While the new names aren’t exactly revolutionary, maybe they feel more poetic, or at least a shorthand for some of the more complicated cards. You can read all about my new name for The Hermit card here, and in the case of The Hierophant, I call that card, The Sage, which is really just a more common name today for the same thing, the bringer of the sacred.
The Empress and Emperor cards, however, aren’t as straightforward as renaming The Sage. I used to be confused between the Kings and The Emperor, aren’t they the same thing? Then there was also The Empress, and how is she different from the Queens?
The Mother and The Mentor
So when I was painting the Emperor and the Empress, I looked to the symbols and the things they wanted to say, and found new names for them, The Mother, and The Mentor.
These names make sense to me in our current context. The fertile creativity and authentic manifestation strength of the Mother card, and the generous authority of the Mentor card that doesn’t dominate but uses their power to uplift and inspire others.
When I do a reading and see the Mother card, she isn’t confused with a Queen, as queenly as she is. She is the embodiment of creativity itself, a pregnant Venus, a pomegranate at her side. Maybe there is a new project manifesting or even a new baby or business or something gestating, something that is becoming eventually.
And when my Mentor comes up, I can see the interpretations so much more easily! I’m not looking at a man in robes, and trying to translate what it means now. I am looking at a woman showing a young girl how to use a wand, made from a natural tree branch, an activity that represents the generous instruction of how to develop one’s own divine abilities.
That is what I want to apply to the reading — at its simplest, that the seeker may need to be a mentor now, or they may need a mentor, depending on the context, or some variation of an authority figure that guides.
One can translate these meanings to any deck, and other decks may have somewhat different meanings for those cards, along with the more complex interpretations that they will have depending on the other cards around them. But it’s why I changed the names in my deck, to resonate with how I see the those cards when I am working with them.
Try thinking about the Mother and the Mentor in your next reading where the Empress and/or Emperor cards come up, and see where it leads you.