What does The Empress mean reversed?

The Thoth Tarot is traditionally read without reversed cards: the reader judges from the cards around it whether a card is well or ill dignified. This is its ill-dignified or blocked reading: Fertility is blocked or turns into excess: indulgence, jealousy, care that smothers. Direct some of the nourishment back toward yourself.

What are the Kabbalah and astrology correspondences of The Empress?

In the Golden Dawn system The Empress corresponds to the Hebrew letter Daleth, path 14 of the Tree of Life between Chokmah and Binah, the element Spirit and Venus in astrology.

Thoth Tarot · Major Arcana

The Empress

fertility · love · beauty · abundance · nature

A reflective starting point

What is The Empress asking you to look at?

Meaning changes with the position, the surrounding cards and your question. Take what follows as a language, not a verdict.

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Upright

A time of growth and fertility: what you tend will bear fruit. Make room for pleasure, creativity and generosity.

At first sight

Fertility, pleasure, material and emotional abundance. It points to gestation in the broad sense: projects that grow, relationships that flower, wellbeing and domestic harmony.

Within you

It embodies the ability to receive, nourish and enjoy life; the relationship with the body, with beauty and with the maternal principle.

On the path

Path 14 from Chokmah to Binah, the letter Daleth (the door, 4) and Venus: the horizontal path joining the supreme Father and Mother. It is the door through which divine force becomes living form, the love that generates.

The shadow

Ill-dignified, it signals dissipation, luxury, possessiveness, emotional dependence or stagnation in comfort.

Reversed

In the Thoth tradition a reversed card is read through its dignity with the neighbouring cards; this is its shadow side.

Fertility is blocked or turns into excess: indulgence, jealousy, care that smothers. Direct some of the nourishment back toward yourself.

In love, work and spirit

Love. A warm, sensual, nourishing relationship; a possible wish for family or for a new emotional beginning.

Work. Creative and productive projects expanding, collaborative environments, earnings born of patient care.

Spirit. Nature as temple: the divine recognised in beauty and in generation.

Correspondences

Daleth ד · path 14 (Chokmah – Binah) · Spirit · Venus

Crowley's note

Crowley links the Empress to the alchemical Salt and to the door of Daleth; at her feet the pelican feeds its young with its own blood, and on the shield the white eagle: mother and bride, form receiving force.