Do We have the Right to Develop Our Inner Empress?

In a time when we are becoming increasingly aware of the Incompletions in our world, we are also finding life increasingly thought provoking. Many of us are awakening to the stories of other cultures and communities and are faced with the challenge of putting forth effort to nourish our inner Empress while so many others struggle.

In order to explore this more deeply, we need to differentiate the Queen archetype from the Empress archetype. When we look to the Tarot deck for guidance to this practical question that affects our lives so intimately, we can see that the Empress is an archetypal role model/ teacher because she is in the Major Arcana. The Queen is a mask that we wear.

Tarot teaches us that we are all shape-shifters on some level, for in each of our dramas and encounters, we play a role. This role serves the development of the archetypes of the Major Arcana. In essence, these are the physical manifestations and characters representing a lesson, message, or embrace from the Major Arcana archetypes. In some ways, we can look to the Major Arcana players as ancient Spirit Guides, as our World Ancestry speaking to us of history and lessons learned. The Tarot serves as our native oral tradition passed on in these memetic cards with coded images.

The Queen archetype is a role, a job, a duty. She is the character we have chosen to play in the past as a nation and culture. We can look to our patriotic activities to see evidence of this; we have beauty pageants which claim the winner as “Queen”, along with Prom Votes which produce a Queen and we have a celebrity system which is in never-ending competition for “Queen-dom” in myriad categories (money, sex, fashion, dating, career, motherhood, humanitarian work, drama, etc...).

No doubt, when we see our Empress expression through the tiny lens of the Queen, we see we have exhausted her ability. So, when we see the Empress as the Queen while the world’s people are starving, we also see ourselves as a Marie Antionette character.

Summation? This means we need to change our version of the Empress, the role, the ego. If we can look beyond our ego, in this case the Queen archetype, and straight into the Empress archetype, we can also see the template for a new character, one that is truly more congruent with the Empresses virtues, indeed, the Empress herself! While we will ultimately play other roles to navigate in life, when we are connected to the true energy fueling our experiences in these roles, we can play them with more humility, joy, and devotion.

Thoughts?