Today's
TarotReading

The Empress carries the energy of the sacred first-flourishing-mother — the great mother of abundance, beauty, and the fertile earth. She is the third card of the Major Arcana, the number of creation: one and one making something new. Where the High Priestess holds the hidden mysteries, the Empress brings them into bloom, into fruit, into the visible richness of the world.

The Empress does not, faithfully, mean only motherhood in the literal sense. She is the creative force in every life: the gardener, the artist, the cook, the lover, anyone who brings something living into being and enjoys it. Her teaching is that pleasure and abundance are sacred, and that receiving them is as holy as working for them.

The Empress is ruled by Venus, and tonight the Full Moon rises in Taurus, Venus’s earth sign, on the Sun’s own Sunday. It is the midpoint of the cycle, the Hunter’s Moon, the season of harvest. The Empress could not have chosen a better evening to appear.

A woman sits at ease on soft cushions in a field of ripe golden wheat. She is crowned with twelve small stars, and her gown is patterned with pomegranates. Beside her rests a heart-shaped shield bearing the sign of Venus. Behind her, a cool waterfall spills into a stream, and a green forest rises beyond. A sprig of lavender is tucked into her hair.

The ripe wheat is the harvest — what has grown through patient seasons. The twelve stars are the twelve months and the twelve signs, the whole turning year crowning her. The pomegranates are fruitfulness and the sweetness held inside. The waterfall is the flow of life and feeling that keeps everything green. She is not working the field. She is enjoying it, because it is ripe.

The Empress on the Sun’s own Sunday asks the sovereign feminine one small tender question: what in my life is ripe, and have I let myself enjoy it?

We often rush from one harvest to the next planting without pausing to taste the fruit. The Empress pauses. She sits in the field and lets herself be nourished.

The Full Moon in Taurus opposite the Sun in Scorpio adds depth to the reflection. Scorpio asks what lies beneath; Taurus asks what is here, right now, to be enjoyed. Tonight, let Taurus win.

And because this is the midpoint of the cycle, the reflection is a turning: from here the Moon begins to wane, and the season of releasing begins. First, enjoy the fullness.

Abundance, softly received, is not greed. She is the sovereign feminine seated in her golden field, crowned with stars, letting the harvest nourish her because it was grown to be enjoyed.

I sit, softly, as the Empress sits — at ease in my own golden field, crowned with all the turning year, receiving the fullness of my life with gratitude and pleasure.

1. What has ripened in your life that you have not yet stopped to enjoy?
2. Where do you find it hardest to receive pleasure or abundance without guilt?
3. What are you creating or nurturing right now, and how is it growing?
4. How could you treat your body as the Empress treats her garden — with abundance and delight?

Willa Cather — born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia, in 1873, and brought at nine to the wide Nebraska prairie, where the land and the immigrant families who farmed it shaped everything she would write; who worked as a journalist, teacher, and magazine editor in Pittsburgh and New York before turning to fiction; who won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel One of Ours in 1923; and who died in 1947 — wrote these words in My Ántonia (1918), in a scene where the young narrator lies in his grandmother’s garden among the ripening pumpkins, warm in the autumn sun.

At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. The boy in the garden feels the earth warm beneath him and the sun on his skin, and for a moment he no longer feels separate from the world. Cather describes a happiness that is not achievement or possession but belonging — the self softening into the fullness of nature. It is one of the most loved passages in American writing about the land.

Today’s Empress lives in Cather’s words directly. The Empress in her wheat field is not separate from the abundance around her. She has dissolved into it, complete and great — and that, the card says, is happiness.

“Fields of Gold” — Eva Cassidy (from Songbird, 1998)

Eva Cassidy — born in Washington, D.C., in 1963, a singer and guitarist with a voice of rare clarity who was little known beyond her home city during her short life — recorded her gentle version of “Fields of Gold,” written by Sting. It reached a wide audience on Songbird (1998), a collection released after her death that went on to top the charts in Britain and introduce her to listeners around the world.

Today’s Empress moves gently in this song. It is a love song set among fields of barley swaying in the wind, full of the feeling of a long, good life shared in a golden landscape. Eva Cassidy’s tender, unhurried voice turns it into something like a blessing over the harvest — exactly the field where the flourishing-mother sits.