Compared with many of the other cards of the tarot, the Empress has had a rather uneventful five centuries.
Waite and the other occultists are responsible for the starry crown, the emblem of Venus, the waterfall, and the vegetation and wildlife. In the historical decks the Empress sits on a throne, almost always holding a shield or orb in one hand and a sceptre in the other. The shield typically bears and eagle as the heraldic emblem of the Holy Roman Empire.
Occasionally, the Empress is depicted with wings, like an angel. This can be traced to woodcarvings misunderstanding and miscopying the strangely-shaped throne on which the Empress sits in the Tarot de Marseille pattern. The throne rises up on either side, giving the appearance of wings rising from her back. A similar transformation often occurred with Justice, who sits on a similar throne.
In the Minchiate of Florence, the Empress transformed into a quasi-male figure, dubbed "the Grand Duke" in reference to the city's ruler. This was also probably the result of ambiguity in interpreting the simple woodblock designs, coupled with a pressure to make the "rulers" (Papess, Empress, Emperor, and Pope) more palatable to church authorities (the Minchiate transformed the Pope into a second Emperor and dropped the Papess entirely). Even after the card had been called "the Grand Duke" for centuries, it still retained some distinctly feminine features.
The most direct interpretation of the Empress card is that it simply depicts the Emperor's consort. As mentioned in my posting on the history of the High Priestess card, there was a tradition of using feminine figures as allegories for institutions, so in this sense a woman in imperial regalia can stand for the Empire itself. However, if this were the dominant association for the card, one might expect it to sometimes be called "The Empire", which it never was.
The presence of the Papess in the deck might cause us to modify our interpretation of the Empress, however. Although Gertrude Moakley suggests that the Papess may indeed have been regarded as "the pope's wife", this seems quite odd. Popes obviously did not marry, and I'm not even aware of any stories or legends about pope's wives. Furthermore, the tarot Papess actually wears the sacred trappings of the office, such as the triple crown, which unambiguously makes her a pope. So against this backdrop, we probably ought to view the Empress not as the Emperor's wife, but as an actual ruler, the female Emperor.
This line of thought makes her a symbol of matriarchy, defiantly finding expression in the thoroughly patriarchal culture of Europe as it emerged from the Middle Ages. Female rulers were not entirely unknown of course, but the powers-that-be tolerated a woman being crowned as monarch only as a last resort. The Holy Roman Empire never had a female ruler, nor did any of the northern Italian city-states that existed when the tarot was first created. Naples and Sicily, however, were both ruled by reigning queens in the 14th century.
There is an inevitable parallelism between political authority structures and the authority structures embedded in the institution of the family, especially in previous centuries. Thus Empress and Emperor are Mother and Father, transposed from rulership of the household to rulership of the world. Traditionally, the power of the Father is the power of law and punishment, whereas the power of the Mother is the power of nurturing and love. The Father enforces distinctions, the Mother harmonizes and unifies.
Although there is nothing superficially subversive in the image of the Empress, taken in isolation, her inclusion in the quaternity of rulers and her juxtaposition with the Papess suggests the possibility that she is a wordless manifesto for activating the power of the Mother in the governance of the world. The designers of the tarot would not have used that terminology, of course, but we may speculate that the sentiment was present in the context of a political or theological doctrine to which the designers subscribed.
In this context, it should be remembered that the tarot was the only type of Italian playing cards at the time to include the rank of queen amongst the courts. Italian cards, from the 14th century down to the present day, consistently employ an all-male court of footman, knight, and king. When one realizes that the tarot introduced not only an Empress, but also a Papess and four Queens, into the feudal power structure of the times, the pointedness of these female symbols becomes harder to ignore.
BTW, it grieves me a bit to hear the traditional tarot designs sometimes described as "patriarchal" or "male dominated". The traditional tarot used radically egalitarian symbols of authority, which placed it in stark contrast with the patriarchal institutions of the dominant culture of the time.
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