Major Arcana · III
♀︎ Venus · ד Daleth · Thoth: The Empress
Something is growing. Feed it with care, pleasure and patience; this card favours the body, the senses and making things.
Daleth, the door, is the opening between inside and outside, the womb-door through which life is born. It is a Double letter, value 4; in Kaplan’s Sepher Yetzirah its opposites are Seed and Desolation. The Golden Dawn liked to point out that the Venus symbol ♀, laid on the Tree, touches every sephirah: it is the only planetary sign that does.
The 14th path runs horizontally from Chokmah to Binah, uniting the Supernal Father and Mother: it is the marriage-bed of the Supernals, the door through which force passes into form. With paths 19 and 27, it is one of the three horizontal “reciprocal” paths that cross the Tree like rungs.
Smith’s Empress sits in a cushioned throne in a field of ripe wheat, with a forest and a waterfall behind her. She wears a crown of twelve stars and a robe printed with pomegranates; a heart-shaped shield with the Venus symbol rests beside her, and she holds a sceptre topped by a globe. Waite calls her “the inferior Garden of Eden, the Earthly Paradise”; Case’s key word is creative imagination, the subconscious made fruitful by self-conscious attention.
Crowley’s Empress is the Alchemical Salt, the passive principle of nature, crowned and throned with arms and body forming the symbol of alchemical salt. A pelican feeds her young with her own blood; a white double-headed eagle is on her shield; her throne is surrounded by spiralling flames like a gate of light; the sparrow and dove of Venus perch on her. Crowley stresses that she is both the door of birth and the gate of heaven: “the Gate of Heaven”, as her letter Daleth means.
Card image: Pamela Colman Smith, Rider-Waite tarot, 1909 (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).