Description
This saucy Empress is done in shades of purples and greens, colors that remind me of spring. She appears to sit on a throne that is floating in the heavens. The card is lush, ripe, fruity, blooming, sensuous. It reminds me of a bursting-with-life, lusty-month-of-May day in New England (USA) This card is indicative to me of the lush *good life*, good food, freedom from material want, good company, a *feast* in the realm of the senses.

Response
I want to romp and frolic in the fields of life when I look at this card---it is *so* Beltane, for all you Wiccans/Pagans out there...just gets all those urges going, if you catch my drift. Ahhhhhh, spring! Apparently, this Empress feels the same way for she is divinely ripe and fully-breasted with child, a metaphor for the teeming life force of ALL. She is, to paraphrase Shakespeare's Portia, "master of all she surveys." The ethereal and the material creative and fruit-bearing possibilities are one, united.

Farber writes in the section entitled *The Dream*: "Robed in violet, the color of the spirit, the pregnant Empress sits upon a throne of stone, rooting her to the Earth...By her unseen hand the earth produces a cornucopia of beauty as in a well-tended garden. Her nurturing femininity helps to give birth to creative ideas...

The Empress can help bring daydreams to fruition in a world where logic and intuition should dwell together, as do Heaven and Earth" (p. 18.) He then writes in the section entitled *The Awakening*: "Creative inspiration and productivity are available to you if you will try and bring heaven down to earth. Exert your power with a loving hand."

Dawn