The Emperor

Symbols

• Ram-Headed ThroneRam heads at each corner of the throne — the fire of Aries hardened into a seat of stone.+

  Waite sets aside the older cubic-stone seat, which he says 'confuses some of the issues', and fronts the throne's arms with rams' heads instead — so Aries, the sign the Golden Dawn gives this card, is built into the seat itself.

• Orb and SceptreThe ankh sceptre is the kingdom circumscribed; the small globe in his other hand is the world he holds.+

  Waite calls the sceptre a 'crux ansata' — the Egyptian ankh, the hieroglyph for life. The Empress's sceptre ends in a globe; here sign and globe are held apart, life in the right hand and the world in the left.

• Red MountainsThe red, dry, bony mountains behind him — stability that has been through fire.+

  Waite's text describes no landscape at all; the bare range is Smith's. Set beside the Empress's ripening wheat and waterfall, the Emperor's ground grows nothing — no field, no tree, only rock.

• Iron ArmorIron glimpsed under the crimson robe — to sit is also to be armed; beneath a father's warmth rests the bone of protection.+

  The metal shows at his legs and forearms; the robe hides the rest. The armour suits Mars, ruler of Aries in classical astrology (Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos) and the planet named for the god of war.

• Thin StreamThe narrow watercourse behind the throne, at the foot of the mountains — the last softness allowed within his dry kingdom.+

  In a card whose sign, Aries, is fire and whose ruler, Mars, is for Ptolemy the hot and drying planet, this narrow water is the one cool, moving line — kept small and low, at the foot of the rock.

• Crimson RobeRobes of red and crimson — the war color of Mars composed by rite into the color of kings.+

  The robe shares the fire colours of the mountains and the orange sky behind, so man and land read almost as one mass; what sets him apart from the landscape is the grey stone of the throne, the steel of his armour and the white of his beard.

• Crown and White BeardA crown above long white hair and beard — kingship worn by a head that has aged into it.+

  Waite calls him 'a crowned monarch', and he gives him 'the lordship of thought rather than of the animal world'. The picture divides it the same way: the rams stay on the throne, the crown sits on the man.

• Orange SkyAn orange sky over the red range — no blue anywhere above him, the whole air the colour of heat.+

  The Golden Dawn's Book T titles this trump 'Sun of the Morning, Chief among the Mighty'. Its sign, Aries, opens the zodiac at the March equinox, and classical astrology (Ptolemy) places the Sun's exaltation there.

Story

Almost nothing in this picture moves — at most a thin line of water, low down. The eye goes straight to the centre, where the Emperor faces out at the viewer, square-on, filling nearly the whole height of the card; the throne behind him is wider than his shoulders and rises as high as the frame allows. The light is hot and even. Further back, the land steps away in hard red tiers to an orange sky. No visitor comes; he is the only figure. There is only distance, and a man seated so still that the distance seems to arrange itself around him.

Correspondences

Shadow

Related Cards

The Empress

The Chariot

Four of Pentacles

Combinations with this card