Emperor: “Not Here for a Crown; Here for a New World”
A Journey through the Tarot Major Arcana: The Emperor ~ Card 4
Thanks for joining me on my quest to renew my tarot practice by taking a journey through the cards of the Major Arcana. This is the fifth post in the series, which is an offering for paid subscribers. We focus mainly on the Gaian Tarot and the Herbcrafter’s Tarot in this series, which includes a look at the card’s themes, card comparisons, creative sparks and crafts, journal prompts, and even a playlist inspired by the card. Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear your responses in the comments.
“The Emperor is often depicted as a leader, but a more fitting description would be ‘someone who holds space for the collective.’ They do so through discipline and restraint, not overcontrol. They listen to others’ needs and place them ahead of their own selfish motivations. They’re not here for a crown; they’re here for a new world.”
— Maria Minnis, Tarot for the Hard Work: An Archetypal Journey to Confront Racism and Inspire Collective Healing
The Emperor is one of those cards that can be problematic because of the way traditional cards depict outdated modes of male authority and power. The Rider-Waite-Smith Emperor is an old white man on a throne looking stern, with a harsh landscape behind him. This card immediately conjures up issues around power, conquest, and rulership; and many people (especially women) recoil from it. Back in the 1980s, the Motherpeace deck explicitly made the Emperor the bad guy, depicting him as Alexander the Great, a conqueror who cared only for power and nothing for the earth or people who were “beneath” him.
While I understood the damage of patriarchal rule, I was a mother of two young sons in the 1980s. I wondered if there couldn’t be a more positive side to the Emperor card. My early studies with Rachel Pollack helped me understand the positive attributes of an Inner Emperor. In the Complete Illustrated Guide to Tarot (now out of print), she wrote that if people can see themselves as the Emperor, rather than an outside authority, “he can become a symbol of their own power to define and defend their territory.” That clicked for me. I began to understand that there are two ways to read this card: 1) as a model of leadership, either negative or positive; or 2) as inner qualities to cultivate, such as authority, maintaining boundaries, discipline, and sovereignty.
There’s a difference between healthy maleness and toxic, patriarchal masculinity.