The Emperor: Tarot Meaning, Reversed and Aries

What is in the picture

Pamela Colman Smith drew The Emperor as a bearded ruler on a stone throne carved with rams' heads, an ankh sceptre in his hand and bare mountains behind him. Start there rather than with a keyword list. The scene is the reading, and it is the reason this deck took over from every deck that showed the Majors as plain allegorical figures.

The Emperor upright

The situation wants rules and somebody prepared to hold them. Unglamorous, and usually correct.

The question it actually puts to you: who is actually in charge here, as opposed to who is named. That is the useful part. A card that only tells you what is happening is a horoscope; a card that asks you something is doing the job.

The Emperor reversed

Rigidity for its own sake, or the opposite: an authority that is absent when it is needed.

That is one reading of it, and readers do not agree on how reversals work. There are four common methods, they give different answers, and nobody who tells you theirs is the correct one is describing the tradition honestly.

Plenty of readers shuffle so that reversals never occur, and read the surrounding cards for the same information instead. That is a legitimate method, not a shortcut.

The astrology on this card

Every Major Arcana card has a planetary, zodiacal or elemental attribution in the Golden Dawn system, and The Emperor takes Aries. The card is the sign in a single image. Everything The Emperor is credited with in a reading, structure, authority, boundary, is also on the list for Aries.

If you want the longer version of what Aries does, the Sun in Aries covers the sign at its most undiluted, and Aries rising covers how it behaves as a first impression.

What The Emperor is often confused with

The Hierophant. Both are authority figures. The Emperor makes the rules; The Hierophant keeps the ones already made.

Where these meanings come from

Worth knowing, because most pages present card meanings as though they were handed down from antiquity. Playing cards reached Europe in the fourteenth century and the earliest surviving tarot decks were painted in northern Italy in the fifteenth, as a card game. For roughly three hundred years that is all they were. Divination with them is first clearly documented in the late eighteenth century, in France.

The meanings in use today in English are almost entirely the Rider deck's. It was published in London in 1909: Arthur Edward Waite wrote the scheme, Pamela Colman Smith drew all seventy-eight cards, and she was paid a flat fee and went uncredited on the box for most of a century. Her decision to give every pip card a scene rather than a plain arrangement of symbols is the single reason modern tarot works the way it does, because a picture can be read by somebody who has memorised nothing.

Both of them were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which is where the astrological attributions on this page come from. Those are a genuine system with internal logic, and they are a little over a century old rather than ancient. Saying so costs nothing and it is the difference between a page you can trust on the rest of the detail and a page you cannot.

Using The Emperor in an actual reading

1. Read the position before the card. The same card in a "what is blocking this" position and a "what helps" position is not making the same statement.
2. Describe the picture out loud before reaching for a meaning. Pamela Colman Smith put the information in the image. What the figures are doing is usually the reading.
3. Check the suits around it. This card among four Swords is a different message from the same card among four Cups.
4. Ask what the card asks rather than what it predicts. Tarot is far better at describing a situation you are already in than at naming a date.

If you want something built from your own chart

A card describes a situation. It does not know anything about you specifically, because the deck is the same deck for everybody who picks it up. A birth chart is the opposite: it is built from your date, time and place of birth and it describes one person. Here is how to find your birth time if you do not have it.