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In 1440s Milan, court painter Bonifacio Bembo gilded a playing card showing a pregnant woman seated on a throne. She held a scepter in one hand and a shield bearing an eagle in the other. The Empress in tarot represents earthly sovereignty, creative fertility, and the material abundance that legitimate rule claims to produce. Her crown is not decoration. It is the argument.

We keep a 1480 hand-painted Visconti-Sforza Empress in the library’s climate-controlled vault. The gold has darkened to ochre. The eagle on her shield has lost most of its feathers. But what the card says about power has not faded: that the right to rule flows from the same source as the right to give life.

What Is the Historical Relationship Between The Empress and the Crown?

What Is the Historical Relationship Between The Empress and the Crown

The Empress card emerged from a specific political crisis. In 1447, Filippo Maria Visconti died without a male heir. His illegitimate son-in-law Francesco Sforza claimed the Duchy of Milan. The tarot deck commissioned by the Sforza family was a visual argument for Francesco’s legitimacy.

The Empress on those early cards was not a generic symbol of nature. She was a specific type of ruler: the imperatrix, the woman who holds power either through her own bloodline or as the mother of a dynastic heir. The crown on her head is a closed circlet with fleurons, the same design worn by Empress Bianca Maria Visconti in contemporary portraits. The scepter she holds is a maiestas scepter, the same symbol of jurisdiction carried by Holy Roman Emperors.

The deck did not invent this connection. It codified one that had been running through European political theology for centuries.

Where Did the Empress-Crown Connection Come From?

Where Did the Empress-Crown Connection Come From

The link between female fertility and royal authority is older than tarot. Roman imperial coinage from the second century CE shows empresses holding cornucopias alongside the inscription Fecunditas Augustae: the fertility of the empress equals the stability of the empire. Julia Domna, wife of Septimius Severus, issued coins in 196 CE that pictured her as Ceres, the grain goddess, with the legend Ceres Augusta.

This imagery traveled through Byzantium and into the Carolingian courts. By the twelfth century, queens of France were anointed with holy oil on their breasts and hands, a ritual that explicitly linked their capacity to bear heirs with the sacred character of the monarchy. The coronation liturgy for a French queen included the prayer “May she be fruitful like Rachel, wise like Rebecca, faithful like Sarah.” Legitimate succession depended on legitimate birth. The queen’s body was the proof.

The tarot Empress absorbed this tradition directly. The Visconti-Sforza deck was painted in the same decade that Bianca Maria Sforza negotiated her son’s marriage to the daughter of the King of Naples. The card was propaganda by other means.

How Did Renaissance Humanists Interpret The Empress?

Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine philosopher who translated Plato for the Medici court, wrote in his Three Books on Life (1489) that images of a crowned woman holding a scepter and shield could attract the influence of Venus through “sympathetic magic.” Ficino did not mention tarot by name, but his theory of how images work on the soul applied directly to the trump cards.

The Empress, in Ficino’s framework, was an image of venus naturalis: the generative power of the cosmos expressed through matter. Her crown signified that matter was not chaotic. It was ordered. It had a head. Renaissance Neoplatonists saw the entire universe as a chain of being descending from the One through increasingly dense levels of reality. The Empress governed the level where spirit became substance. The crown was the mark of that office.

Later esoteric writers folded this idea into occult tarot theory. The Empress became associated with Binah, the third sephirah on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, which receives the energy of the crown (Kether) and gives it form. The crown on the Empress’s head became a visual pun: the sephirah Kether means “crown,” and the Empress receives its influence and transmits it downward.

What Did The Empress’s Crown Actually Mean in Royal Iconography?

The crown on early Empress cards was not the open diadem of a princess. It was the closed imperial crown, a metal band with four fleurons that meet at the top. This design was reserved for sovereigns who acknowledged no earthly superior. The Empress card wore the crown of a ruler who answered only to God.

The shield she carried in the Visconti-Sforza deck bore the white eagle of the Sforza family. The eagle was itself an imperial symbol, adopted from the Holy Roman Empire by Milan’s rulers. Every detail of the card was a claim: the Empress is Milan, Milan is the Empire, the Empire is the natural order.

This is why early tarot historians like Gertrude Moakley (1966) argued that the tarot trumps were originally created as a visual allegory for a triumphal procession. The Empress was the float that represented the power of the state to create wealth, ensure harvests, and produce heirs. The crown was not a symbol of fertility. It was a symbol of the state’s claim on fertility.

How Does The Empress Relate to The Emperor in This Framework?

The Emperor card in the same decks shows a seated male ruler with a scepter and orb. Where the Empress holds a shield, the Emperor holds an orb representing dominion over the world. The two cards are not a marriage. They are two faces of the same authority.

Medieval political theory distinguished between the king’s two bodies: the body natural (mortal, physical) and the body politic (eternal, institutional). The Empress and the Emperor in traditional tarot maps onto this distinction imperfectly. The Empress embodies the dynastic body, the physical continuity through childbirth that keeps the body politic alive. The Emperor embodies the body politic directly: law, territory, judgment.

A courtier in 1450s Milan would have read the two cards as a single statement: authority requires both a source of legitimate succession (the Empress) and a current officeholder (the Emperor). Neither card works alone. The Empress without the Emperor is potential without actual power. The Emperor without the Empress is a dynasty without a future.

What Did Later Occultists Make of This History?

The French occultist Eliphas Levi published Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie in 1856. He reinterpreted the Empress as the Gnostic Sophia, divine wisdom trapped in matter. The crown became a symbol of her original sovereignty, lost and remembered.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1888) assigned the Empress to the Hebrew letter Daleth, meaning “door.” In their system, the Empress is the door through which spiritual energy enters material form. The crown became the sephirah Kether, the source of all emanation. They stripped away most of the Renaissance political context and replaced it with a purely metaphysical framework.

Arthur Edward Waite, who designed the Rider-Waite-Smith deck in 1909, kept the crown but changed the Empress’s body language. His Empress sits in a wheat field, pregnant, crowned with twelve stars. The political authority of the Visconti card is gone. What remains is cosmic maternity, the Venus-as-nature image that dominates modern interpretations.

Waite admitted in his Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) that “the Empress is the visible fruition of all that is signified by the Empress in her highest aspect.” He was speaking of the Papess, not the Emperor. The crown still mattered, but it now crowned a different kind of ruler.

Common Misconceptions About The Empress and the Crown

Misconception: The Empress represents untamed nature.
The early decks show the opposite. The Empress is seated on a throne with architectural details. She holds manufactured objects (scepter, shield, sometimes a book). Her crown is the product of a goldsmith. She represents nature as it appears after sovereignty has organized it: fields that produce grain, bodies that produce heirs, cities that produce wealth.

Misconception: The crown is a symbol of personal authority.
In the Visconti-Sforza context, the crown is dynastic. It does not belong to the Empress as an individual. It belongs to the office. The card could have been painted as a portrait of Bianca Maria Visconti, but it was not. It was painted as the type of the imperial consort, the role she filled.

Misconception: The Empress-Empire connection was invented by occultists.
The connection was common knowledge in fifteenth-century Italy. The tarot cards were called trionfi, triumphs, and the sequence of trumps followed the order of floats in a Renaissance triumphal procession. The Empress float came before the Emperor float. Everyone who saw the deck understood the reference.

Misconception: The Empress is always a maternal figure.
Early decks show the Empress pregnant, but the emphasis was on dynastic continuity, not nurturing. The crown does not make her a mother. It makes her a conduit for legitimate succession. Modern decks that de-emphasize the crown and emphasize the belly are making a different card than Bembo painted.

FAQ

Did the Empress card originally represent a specific historical person?
Possibly Bianca Maria Visconti, but the card was designed as a type, not a portrait. The crown and shield bear generic imperial symbols, not personal heraldry.

Why does the Empress wear a closed crown in early decks?
The closed crown (four fleurons meeting at the top) was reserved for sovereigns who recognized no feudal superior. It signaled that the Empress held authority directly from God, not from a husband or father.

How did the Crown change in modern tarot decks?
The Rider-Waite-Smith deck replaced the closed imperial crown with an open tiara of twelve stars. Later decks often reduce the crown to a wreath or remove it entirely, shifting the card’s meaning from political authority to natural fertility.

Is the Empress’s crown the same as the Emperor’s crown?
In early decks, no. The Emperor’s crown is often open (a diadem) while the Empress wears a closed circlet. The difference signaled that the Empress’s authority was dynastic and embodied, while the Emperor’s was jurisdictional and exercised.

The crown on the Empress card is a document. It records a specific moment in European political history, when the right to rule and the capacity to bear children were the same argument. The card did not invent that argument. It preserved it in gold leaf and tempera, so that five centuries later, we could still read what a Milanese duke wanted us to believe about power.

To understand how the crown works on the other trump cards, see our guide to tarot symbolism. For the full sequence of the Visconti-Sforza deck and its imperial imagery, the Tarot of the Sforza Court entry in our glossary documents each card’s iconography. For the broader doctrine of the two bodies and how Renaissance magic connected them, the Tarot hub collects everything the library holds on the subject.