THE EMPRESS / VENUS / BOWER OF BLISS
Creative Imagination, Power of Symbol
Chaotic systems, fractals, seed level, Archetypes and Symbols
The Great Mother, Nature, Growth
Abundance, luxury, comfort, being grounded
Connection with nature, rootedness, earthly refuge
Material wealth, marriage, increase, growth
The seed of love and truth. The fecund, bountiful,
loving mother.
Your inner relationship to your own mother
She Who Sets In Order - the Consort of the Emperor
The nurturing aspect of the anima.
-
The Empress's door has also been compared to the womb, as the gateway of
life; the prenatal epoch is for most people the source of dim memories of
an Arcadian, perfect world, an Avalon, a bower of bliss, a sundappled, sheltered
glen.
Madonna and Child - Boltraffio - 1495
Motherhood blankets existence.
Camille Paglia
The door is also self protection, sequestering, storage, conservation,
and development. This is the door of the house in Key
1. The door leads both in and out; this shows connection to the
travel suggested by the camel in Key
2.
"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear
to man as it is, infinite."
(William Blake)
EAST, the direction assigned to Key 3 on the Cube of Space, is the direction
of sunrise, the Doorway of the Sun, and the Birth of the Day.
- The Empress is Gaia, or Mother Nature - she is the same woman opening the
lion's mouth in the Strength card,
and she is the woman in Key 17.
3, the number of the Empress, is the number of "conditions," or "states" that
the 4 elements take in the Zodiac. The Empress (3) and the Emperor (4) work
together to create 12.
The Empress holds her arms in the
"coagula/solve" position -
meaning "coagulate (or join) - and
"dissolve." The "coagulation" is a drawing-in
of energy. The "solve" is the use of the
energy to dissolve, or cut like a laser. Keys
0,
1, 3,
4,
11,
&
15
share this symbolism.
The Empress wears a crown of 12 stars. Crowns appear in Key
2, Key 3, Key 4,
Key 5, Key 7,
Key 11, Key 14,
Key 16, Keter,and Malchut.
The Venus symbol is on a heart-shaped shield by her throne. She sits in a fertile and productive garden, the Earthly Eden. It is the same as the garden in Key 1. Her scepter is topped with the globe of this world.
The waterfall at her side is the same water that flows from the robe of the High Priestess, the stream of consciousness. A waterfall symbolizes penetration and receptivity, the power of falling water and the calm acceptance of the pool.
Cypress trees, sacred to Venus, grow in the background. The ripening wheat in the foreground is sacred to Ceres, the corn-earth Goddess, and to Hathor (ATOR), the Egyptian harvest Goddess.
Her blond hair shows the radiance of prana, life-breath, and her wreath is of Myrtle, also sacred to Venus. Her seven pearls are gifts of Neptune.
The waxing, crescent moon under her foot shows her power over the growing,
active, lunar subconscious energy. It also completes the symbolism at Revelation
12:1 -
"And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman
clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, on on her head a crown
of twelve stars; she was with child..."
CHAOTIC SYSTEMS, FRACTALS, & SYMBOLS
The feminine character of the Empress is nature, patterned, flowing, billowy,
and nurturing. Key 3 intersects with Key
2, whose High Priestess symbolizes the the dark side of the feminine,
the chaos, and the cthonic grinding in the deep bowels of the Earth, the lunar
feminine flux.
Until recently, it was believed that all chaotic systems were invariably
subject to entropy; that is, ever increasing disorder. With the ability to
crunch huge numbers that came with computers, it was realized that there is
another kind of chaos: Deterministic Chaos - apparent chaos that reveals patterns
over time and space, meaning that with enough distance, the apparent disorder
of water molecules in the ocean is seen as ripples or waves, or that after
time, a repeating scenario is seen as part of a larger historical pattern.
The Empress is the generatrix of ideas, the multiplication of images,
the subconscious matrix from which arise new concepts and mind-forms. This
multiplication is shown in the wheat growing in front of her; each seed head
represents an exponential increase from the original seed of that plant.
There is endless multiplication, repetition, and self-similarity in nature,
because space/time is fractal. The fractal's convolutions are the folds
of the Empress Mother's blankets. She also has control over sequence of
development (gestation - Fallopian billows), another key component of
the fractal - a mathematical representation of the mind of Goddess.
Natural patterns are fractal; fractals are "Chaotic Systems." They reveal
patterns in apparent chaos; they "gestalt" a confusing miasma of numbers and
show infinitely complex and beautiful patterns. The fractal begins with a
"seed" formula, then develops through re-iteration; the same formula
is repeated millions of times, the results of each operation fed into the
next one. This is called a feedback loop. The perimeter of the fractal
is a graph of all of the equation results.
Mandelbrot fractal X7 (seven magnifications)
The fractal exhibits certain features. It has self similarity over
time and space. It has strategic dependence on initial conditions,
where a tiny difference at the Seed Level, at the very beginning of the process,
can make immense differences after development, repetitions, and re-iterations.
It has infinite depth; it can be enlarged forever without losing detail. A
fractal is a finite area with an infinitely long perimeter.
Mandelbrot fractal X13 (thirteen magnifications)
Fractals, and nature, are "attracted" into their patterns by mathematical
versions of our Symbols; they are "power points" or "gravity wells,"
that influence the final form of the pattern. Our symbolic belief systems,
dreams, archetypes, and personal associations are the same thing. They inform
our lives, affecting us as much as we affect them, and help to create the
fractal of our personalities, souls, and life stories.
| Six Essential Elements of Symbols:
They
- point beyond themselves
- participate in that toward which they point
- open up levels of reality which otherwise are closed to us
- unlock dimensions and elements of our soul which correspond to the
dimensions and elements of reality
- cannot be produced intentionally
- grow and die (when they can no longer produce a response)
Paul Tillich,The Dynamics of Faith.
New York: Harper and Row 1956
Symbols express what is beyond words.
Through means of the symbol, there is revealed
hidden light from the concealed life of the Infinite that illuminates
from within.... One could say that all of creation is only a language,
a symbolic expression of that level which cannot be apprehended by thought...
the entire world is thus a symbolic body, within whose concrete reality
there is reflected the divine secret.
Gershom Scholem : On The Possibility of Jewish Mysticism
in Our Time : 1997
|
Mandelbrot fractal X21 (twenty-one magnifications)
The Empress is a doorway to the Symbolic realm, the way to transcend the
content and merge with the form. She is "relaxing into" a symbol, a dream, or
an event, and using its dissonance to create new strategies, and harmonize with
it. Key 3 balances, or offsets the shadow, Key 2.
Mandelbrot fractal X40 (forty magnifications)
She copes with the unpredictability, the confusion, and the seeming deception
and disorder of the High Priestess,
the Kali aspect of the Goddess and the Universe. She is the feminine that
rules by virtue of her stamina, determination, and ability to deal with chaos
(i.e. child rearing).
Mandelbrot fractal X59 (fifty-nine magnifications)
The wheat stalks are also a reference to the parable of the Loaves and the
Fishes (Matt. 14:16); the multiplication of five loaves of bread to five thousand,
an example of a powerful symbol, a metaphor about the infinite availability
of Spirit. This example demonstrates the cognitive dissonance, or "oddness"
of a symbol that works, because it teases us into thought. The symbol juxtaposes
discordant ingredients and forces us to extract a new vision of the original
elements.
Symbols allow us to contact and work with the unconscious realm, Key
2, and the Shadow, Key 15.
The Symbol associated with the Empress, the Great Mother,
is a Cauldron:
The Cauldron is a container in which to mix ingredients
and bring forth a Sacred, purified result
"What we call "nature" is only the maximum structure into which
all material elements have entered, and nature is a work of love because it
means the generation or creation of some things inside others, the birth of
one from another in which it was preconceived, preformed, virtually contained."
Ortega y Gasset, Jose. Meditations on Quixote.
New York: N.W. Norton and Company, 1961.
Mandelbrot fractal X200 (two hundred magnifications)
Rites of passage and transformation rituals often follow a pattern of descent
into chaos (Key 2) and a subsequent re-ordering of the world. This is the
same as the order emerging from chaos in the fractal, and the same as the
cauldron's boil bringing forth the finished product. The Empress shows the
process of bringing order out of the High Priestess' testing thicket of confusion.
Venus
Venus' placement at birth sets the character for the person's receptive
capacities, of the ability to bond with others. It shapes the way our emotions
work; it shows our artistic abilities, our abilities at tact, our way of expressing
affection, and who we are attracted to.
VENUS
Venus infuences the love nature. Afflictions to Venus create troubled love-life
or friendships, or hamper the ability to enjoy life.
Venus takes 224 days to complete it's orbit through the zodiac.
Well-aspected Venus can bring comfort and beauty. Venus with difficult aspects
can be miserable. When she is powerful, she can overcome less fortunate energies
in a chart, or lend softness to a bad situation.
Venus is Exalted in Pisces, and Rules
Taurus/Libra.
Venus' detriment is Aries/Scorpio
and its fall is Virgo.
The Sepher associated with Venus is Netzach.
