3 - The Empress Tarot Card

The Empress is tarot card number 3, although it is the 4^th card of the Major Arcana because the 1^st of the 22 Major Arcana cards is number 0 (The Fool).

The Empress tarot card is regal and feminine, yet distinctly different from any of the four Queens.

The Empress herself is usually depicted as more mature in years than any of the (often elegant-looking yet young) Queens. She conveys a sense of stability, maturity, accomplishment, and completeness. Nevertheless, far from images of an elderly Empress, in many tarot decks the Empress is obviously pregnant. This is fitting because the themes of this card include abundance and fertility. (The empress isn't always pregnant. Images vary from tarot deck to tarot deck. For example, the The Quest Tarot Deck depicts a naked young woman on The Empress card, though the meaning of the card is the same as for other decks.)

The Empress is a nurturing energy that may prompt questions about the balance of caring relationships in the matter to which the reading pertains.

Many readers (and sitters) find comfort in the presence of the Empress in a reading.

The Empress tarot card is often decorated with very many detailed images that suggest various forms of abundant blessings and creativity. These may include

pregnancy,
rich clothes,
beautiful expensive-looking jewellery,
representation of an abundant harvest of beautiful ripe fruits and vegetables,
calm pleasant weather conditions,
facial expressions of contented satisfaction and happiness.

Note: The image of this tarot card shown on the right (above-right) is from an early French tarot deck that has been made available for general use via the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. This shows a distinctly different style of illustration from that of modern tarot decks but is of historical and artistic interest.

The Gilded Tarot (Book and Tarot Deck Set)

More about the Major Arcana

The cards of the Major Arcana are widely considered to be the most powerful cards in the Tarot Deck. The 22 cards of the Major Arcana tell a complete story when arranged in upright and numerical order (beginning with 0 - The Fool then progressing through the sequence of Major Arcana cards until 21 - The World).
This is a story of personal development and enlightenment that is sometimes referred to as "The Fool's Journey".

Some texts also include meanings for "reversed cards". These are for the situation in which the cards are shuffled in both order and orientation. The theoretical advantage to this is that it effectively doubles the number of possible "cards" in the deck from 78 to 156. However, in terms of the calculation of obtaining results according to chance alone, it is not a simple mathematical doubling because once a card has been drawn it cannot be drawn again in the opposite orientation in the same reading.

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