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The Empress Tarot Card Spread - A Tarot Spread for Self Nourishment

By Tina Gong

Published February 04

Summary of the Empress Tarot Card Meaning

After learning about our inner worlds, the Fool moves onto learning about our outer world and how to relate to it. The Empress is traditionally a mother figure; she bestows us with the gifts of unconditional love, nourishment and generosity. She gives selflessly because she also represents the abundance of nature, humanity’s original mother. (We can sadly reflect what this means in today’s world, where we’ve essentially taken all we can from our planet without understanding the consequences, and how that symbolically intersects with how we treat and view femininity). She therefore also represents the creative force, the endlessly flowing river of life, which gives rise to constant generation and regeneration.

Light: Abundance, creativity, nourishment, unconditional love, generosity
Shadow: Neglect, impoverishment, scarcity

To learn more, read the full Empress tarot card meaning.

When to Use This Tarot Spread

When you’re trying to better distinguish the boundaries between self and other.
When you’re looking to learn how to better take care of both yourself and others.
When you’ve been so focused on care taking that you’ve neglected to take care of yourself.

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The Empress Tarot Card Spread

To Give - What can I offer to the world right now? What do I have to give?
To Keep - What should I keep for myself? What is mine, sovereign and should be protected and guarded?
To Nurture - What is in the process of fruition now, that I can nourish? What thing, inside or outside of me needs my care?
To Pull Back - Where am I overextending? Where are you giving too much of yourself? Where in life do you keep saying “yes”, even when it’s hurting you in the long term?

A Note on the Fool's Journey Tarot Spreads: This is part of a series of tarot spreads inspired by the lessons of the Fool’s Journey, represented by the major arcana of the tarot. Since each major arcana card embodies a stage in one’s life journey, a lesson, or an archetype, we can use them as the foundations to explore moments of our own personal journeys. They also happen to be great ways to explore the meanings of each of these tarot cards in a very personal way.

For more of these spreads, please head here.

And if you'd like to purchase the deck depicted in these spreads, you can click here to purchase it! You can also purchase its Marseille cousin.