The Empress

The Empress is Good Nature, that part of nature not trying to kill and eat us, but she’s also the one being kind to the predator who might. She’s life in its procreative, positive mode, expanding and experimenting. This is life out in the open, in broad daylight, not a card of undercurrents and hidden meanings. Seeking secrets and omens seeks too deeply. She is the accessible goddess, the one we touch whenever we touch flesh. This is sensible nature, beauty even in the most ordinary, importance even in the small. We enjoy our earthly paradise here, cherishing the world, not flying our spirits high above it like kites, but living down deep in the juices of life. And that the glory of the world is transient is reason to make the most of it while it lasts, not to dismiss it to look for something eternal instead. She is a medicine woman as well, healthy and healing, and knowing her herbs. She is also Gaia, mother of the material, moist, warm, and worldly, and Isis unveiled, not even a little bit shy. She is the woman clothed with the sun, not from the book, but as feminine sexuality dignified. She is Ceres, goddess of grain, and a life lived close to rich soil. She’s a goddess of love and ripeness for love. As the Dineh chant, ‘With beauty all around me, I walk.’ We reunite with nature and with our own half-forgotten natures here. We reconnect and interconnect with all our relations that our culture has hidden or taken away. We struggle against this culture to participate in the flesh again. Warren McCulloch wrote, “But we, to little State and transient God, gave all our souls and let our loved ones bleed. Thus have we bought again the vanquished grace of nature’s moral law. Again we come out of our lesser loyalties, in tears, to build love’s well-earned city in the rich sod.” Our nostalgia and our longing for real community can be found here in this Trump. Our ecosphere, our biosphere and its biodiversity, the authority of nature and natural ways, the emergence, renewal, and decay of life, are what pass here for the divine, an emergent divinity, creating with materials at hand, creating with living accomplices, not the divine come down from on high with mysterious plans and purposes. Mary Oliver wrote, “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” This is evolution before selection, but make no mistake, selection will happen. Part, and eventually all, of this explosion of life and gifting of birth will be mulch and food for other parts. Nature’s basic disaster plan requires too much and too many. To encourage the breeding we have elegance, beauty, exuberance, and orgasms. Mother Nature nurtures exceptions and the exceptional, but she also brings forth the miscreant and the good-for-nothing parasites. Superabundance stocks the food chain and the unfit and misfits become food of the fit. Overgrowth needs pruning. Prosperity doesn’t happen without regard to its consequences, but happens because there will be. We at least take some comfort here: everyone alive has descended from a very long line of survivors. While nature is not a protective force or a guardian, we have it in our nature to keep going, and today at least it is home. In the end, the most help is for those who help themselves, but loosely, with laws like averages. Dark nature, all red in tooth and claw, may or may not be nearby, may or may not forgive our little experiments. But that’s what life is. The Empress card means affection and contact, nurturing and compassion, comfort and reassurance. She is that great bag of tricks that life has learned to play on us with juices like oxytocin and dopamine and limbic kinds of love that make use of our basic emotions. In fact, she is all of the juicy tricks that life has learned, to help us satisfy our needs and wants, the inborn reward systems, the pleasures we have when we’re on our way, and the jubilant rejoicings we have on arrival. And, of course, to get us there, we also have our hungers and thirsts, our passions and desires, our preferences and tastes, our values and standards, the powers that draw and attract us. She is elan vital and its joie de vivre. She is the strategy by which we bargain and negotiate our way to success, but she is more persuasive than rational, more seductive than straightforward. The driving force is self- interest, that wants to learn the way from deluded to enlightened forms. She is more fun and playful than serious and calculating, even when she takes her calculation seriously. She is pathesis, knowledge gained through feeling, knowl- edge that only takes form when stratagems succeed.