Reading Tarot Like The Empress

There is a story told about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Finding himself in a state that we would now call writers block, he got a job as a secretary to a sculptor he admired, Rodin. (You might know Rodin but not know you do. He is most famous for the sculpture called “The Thinker,” the guy sitting with his head in his hand like he’s nursing a headache.) Rilke was young when he went to work for Rodin, but not completely inexperienced. He had a couple of books of poems under his belt already. He had even developed a style and a method. Like the High Priestess, his process was an introverted one. He looked within. Inspiration came from his inner life and memories, and he waited around the shore of his unconscious for inspiration to strike. When he went to work for Rodin, this process was failing him. He didn’t want to sit around and wait for the muse anymore. He just wanted to get to work. Rodin had a reputation for being a craftsman, for setting his mind to a project and making it without theatrics, and Rilke wanted to learn how to do that. He hoped that by spending time around the artist, he would learn Rodin’s secret and become a craftsman of words. 

One day, Rodin asked how Rilke’s poetry was going. Rilke told him about his troubles, and Rodin gave him this advice: Go to the zoo. Choose an animal, and look at it until you really see it. It might take weeks, he said, but Rilke should be patient. 

Rilke went. He chose the panther and sat in front of its cage until he was inspired to write the poem “The Panther.” When I read that poem, I see this: That man is bored. He is so tired of looking at this big cat walking back and forth in front of iron bars, he can’t stand it anymore. There is nothing else in the world but this cat and this cage. He can’t move until he really sees this thing, whatever that means. The only thing he knows is that it isn’t happening. Every once in awhile, he thinks he has a flash of inspiration, but then it vanishes, and he’s not sure of anything anymore. 

I imagine Rilke walking away from the Panther’s cage clutching the notebook that will hold the collection that he will eventually call New Poems. The notebook is ragged from his constant handling it of but the pages are blank, all except for one, and that page contains only a single short poem about a panther. 

At least, after all of that, I got a poem, he must have been thinking. 

Turning Toward The World

In Rilke’s path through the Fool’s Journey, “The Panther” is the turning point between the High Priestess and the Empress. The High Priestess looks within. Just like your eyes need a moment to adjust when you have been staring at a book for hours and then look out the window, this poem is the process of Rilke changing the focus of his vision from his inner world to the outer world. 

In “The Panther,” he doesn’t quite escape the inner world. It’s hard to tell if the poem is about the poet or the panther. 

But then something extraordinary happens. 

He conducts the experiment again. This time, he looks at an ancient, headless sculpture of Apollo and writes “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” The poem begins with the same structure, a description of the sculpture, a poetic version of the type of work visual artists do when they are rolling around an idea and make a lot of sketches just looking at what they want to draw. Instead of focusing on what he sees, though, he cheats a little and focuses on what you can’t see, beginning his poem with, “We cannot know his legendary head.” 

Then he has an epiphany: 

From all the borders of itself,

burst like a star: for there is no place 

that does not see you. You must change your life. 

His epiphany is the shock of recognition. The panther had eyes but saw nothing. The statue, despite the fact that it has no head, sees him, and in that moment Rilke’s eyes are opened, and he sees. 

What was that moment of recognition like? What burst like a star? He doesn’t say, and if you’re feeling in a particular mood you might make guesses in a certain direction. But. I’m going to take what he said about “stars” and go a bit further with it.

The process by which stars burn is called fusion. When stars burn, a practically infinite number of chemical reactions happen in which two atoms join—fuse—together and become a third thing. 

“The Panther” is, really, about Rilke. The panther is the object onto which he projects his inner world. It’s a great poem as a poem, but he’s trying to break out of that High Priestess mode, and he’s just not getting it yet. It’s still all about him. The panther is a metaphor for himself. In “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” it starts being about his gaze, and then his gaze and the statue’s gaze meet, and those deeper eyes, the ones that refused so frustratingly to open in “The Panther,” open wide in shock at the spectacle of seeing something that is not Rilke himself. In “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” he stops considering the statue as an object to play his own heart strings on and encounters it as an Other, what the philosopher Martin Buber called a “Thou.” The object of Rilke’s poem is not longer an “it,” an object to use or experience. The statue is a being with whom he can have a relationship of dialog. Rilke’s seeing talks to the statue’s seeing, and they (or Rilke, at least) find a mutual understanding. This Other sees him, and Rilke sees this Other, and, in really seeing, Rilke falls in love, and fusion happens. The resulting work is a love poem to a ruined work of art, a third thing that comes from these two seeing each other. 

The Empress Of The Senses

If you read Tarot books, you’ll be told that the Empress is about the senses. The focus here immediately goes to pleasure. You are often told to savor sensual experiences. That’s great. Sometimes when the Empress comes up in a reading, all you really need is a bath with lots of sparkly things in it. 

But there is a tradition in many cultures of seeing empresses as divine. If the Empress was a goddess, what would that mean? What if you really held the senses to be sacred?  

The senses are by their very nature an encounter with the Other. You see seagulls. You taste the bitterness of your tea. You smell the heady, spicy, slightly trippy smell of frankincense. You hear the wind blow. You feel your lover’s hand on your leg, palm up, waiting for you to take their hand in yours. These encounters, if you are vulnerable and open yourself up to them, are sacred, encounters with the Holy Other. It is through these encounters that we experience the Holy Thou.

Empathy is a high-flying abstract word that has somehow managed in certain communities to become a burden and a point of pride. A similar, maybe better, term is ”resonance.“ Resonance happens when a thing that happens to one thing also happens to another thing. Andrea Gibson captures it beautifully in her poem, “Say Yes.”

When two violins are placed in a room

if a chord on one violin is struck

the other violin will sound the note. 

Resonance an essential element in divinatory readings. We’ve talked about how to read like the Fool, how to open yourself up to enchantment while working with the Magician, and how to tap into your own intuition in the High Priestess. The wisdom of the Empress in readings is the wisdom of relationship. There’s a huge Venus glyph in a heart on the RWS card as if Pamela Coleman Smith wanted to shake us and say, “It’s about love, people!”

When I do a reading for someone, I lay out the cards or pull up the birth chart. When I first look, the symbols are just “its” to me. They’re tools for me to use to work my craft. I stare at them for awhile. I make connections. I build associations. I connect what I’m seeing with what my intuition is saying. When I’m doing a past life reading, I’m reading the birth chart specifically with the goal of figuring out what a person’s mistakes have been. I take my little candle and set out into the darkness of the human heart, but when I really sit with a chart when I’m doing a past life reading, there never fails to be a moment when I snap into Empress mode. The experience is just like how Rilke describes it. It’s like a star suddenly bursts into life. An image comes to me—usually literally when I’m doing past life readings—and I see the person I’m reading for as a person. It’s no longer about the Hermit or the Star or Judgement. It’s about a very lonely person who wants so badly to shine but is afraid of being judged. I encounter them as a “Thou.”

The Peacemaker Queen

We discussed the High Priestess as participating in the Dark Goddess archetype. The Empress is the other divine feminine archetype in the major arcana. She is the Mother Goddess, an archetype she shares with Demeter, Gaia, and the Virgin Mary.

The archetypes of the RWS are deeply rooted in the roles of Medieval Europe. In Medieval Europe, the queen had two roles. The first was to make babies for the king. The second was to be an angel of mercy. It was the special right and responsibility of the queen to show compassion. A medieval king couldn’t be merciful, even if he wanted to. It would have made him look weak, and he would have been swarmed by his lords and assassinated as soon as they could get their weapons together. The queen had to carry all of the mercy for the two of them. She could appeal to the king publicly to spare condemned criminals. She could ask him to make peace in a time of war. He could listen to her without ruining his reputation and opening himself up to attack.

Much has been made of the sexism in this role, so I won’t dwell on it here. Instead, I will point out that this role is descended from a sacred office. The right to come between two armies and stop a war was one that belonged to the ancient Druids. They had to spend twenty years studying to earn that right—which says something, I think, about how much the Celts loved war. Much of that study was in learning to divine, and I suspect that in a warrior culture, no small part of that was about learning to find the Thou in the enemy and have the courage to show compassion. I doubt the monarchs of Medieval Europe remembered this old Druid role consciously when the queens took on this role—or I doubt the queens would have been allowed to take on that kind of power—but it is there in the cultural memory, the leader whose power comes from their ability to find that which is worth saving in the heart of the criminal, warlord, and traitor.

To me, this is the heart of the Empress. It’s about looking until you really see, listening until you really hear, touching until you really feel, tasting until you really taste, and smelling until…you get the idea; and through the senses encountering another self, finding what there is to love in the Thou you’re encountering. When you do that, you’re participating in the very force that makes the stars burn.

This post was originally published on Aquarius Moon Journal on 21 March 2020.