*Empress = Taurus (the most fertile of signs) and the Lovers = Venus (the Goddess of Love)
In an earlier post (linked below), I explored “rethinking” the Golden Dawn’s astrological assignments for the Major Arcana based on my five decades of practice with the esoteric tarot and astrology. This is the third in my series of follow-up essays on the subject. Here is the relevant text:
“The Empress, the Lovers and Justice are joined by their connection to Venus (agrarian Taurus seems obvious for the Empress, having a slight edge over the sensual-but-exalted mythological Venus, whom I can see standing in for the presiding angel in the Lovers rather than her son, Cupid – the most common modern interpretation of the Lovers seems to lean that way; Justice partakes of the “evaluative” side of Venus, a higher expression of the Taurean preoccupation with values, and the crucible in which many relationships are tested).”
I don’t make much practical use of the position of the tarot trumps on the Qabalistic Tree of Life in divination, so my assumptions here are entirely astrological in nature. The Empress and Taurus seem to fit “hand-in-glove,” as do Venus and the Lovers, if only from a mythological perspective. Venus presides over the romantic impulse, as exemplified in story and song, while the original connection of Fixed, stability-oriented Taurus to the spiritual authoritarianism of the Hierophant was never a comfortable match in my estimation (as the old Maine wags used to say, “You can’t get there from here”). So I bumped Taurus out and replaced it with Sagittarius, the sign of “higher learning,” for that trump and shifted Gemini from the Lovers to Temperance, concentrating the “chymical wedding” in that card (both of which are topics for another post). It becomes something of a chess match to slide the pieces around, but I believe that – at least provisionally – I’ve arrived at a more convincing argument.
In truth, there never was a good reason for aligning astrological principles with the historical trump cards in the first place since they were primarily sociopolitical symbols of a cultural hierarchy; they didn’t need the extra baggage of an archetypal or psychological overlay, which – as tarot master Paul Hughes-Barlow has pointed out – was an entirely 20th Century aberration. This opinion converges neatly with my own belief that tarot is not of much use for character analysis of the “psychological profiling” kind since that approach is little more than “mind-reading with props.”
Hughes-Barlow observes that the cards of the tarot impose limits or constraints, they don’t create permissions that facilitate escaping their boundaries. He notes that a trump card in a spread signifies “where movement ceases” as a condition for deciding what to do next, but in line with my own idea that the trumps identify the atmospheric theme or environmental backdrop for the more pragmatic events or circumstances shown by the lesser cards, I would be inclined to treat them as “crisis-points” that interrupt the flow of the narrative in potentially profound ways. In this sense, I believe it is crucial to come up with esoteric correspondences that add to the weight of the testimony and don’t veer off in random directions. A friend of mine once said of the Golden Dawn canon: “Some guys made up a bunch of stuff, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work,” although I personally take all of it with a very large grain of salt.
Parsifal's Wheel Tarot & Astrology 