“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”
– from The Mourning Bride by William Congreve (1697)

AUTHOR’S NOTE: One of my favorite portrayals of scandalized female propriety occurred in the old Chiffon margarine TV commercial, in which a regal woman (who had been deceived by Chiffon’s buttery flavor) intoned acidly over rumbling background thunder: “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature,” essentially an ad-man’s appropriation of William Congreve’s script. The reversal of the Empress card always reminds me of this scene.

Many years ago on the now-defunct Aeclectic Tarot forum, we were discussing the characteristics of the reversed Empress, and someone observed that “she can be a royal bitch” (not the lowly peasant version). Further cultural examples are the Queen of Hearts in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland and Katherina in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, who warned “If I be waspish, best beware my sting,” along with many other cinematic displays of outraged womanhood.

When upright, the Empress is a paragon of benign good will and generosity; she is truly “Mother Nature” in all her glory. Her correspondence to astrological Venus makes her a patroness of lovers and artists; one of her symbols is the cornucopia. But reversal casts a pall over this delightful vision. At its worst, her inherent urge to nurture can trail off into fatuous self-indulgence. Her inbred dignity might not let her become a compulsive libertine, but she would be challenged to hold the line on over-stimulation of the sensual kind.

In a reading I might warn against unruly desires or appetites that are too extravagant or sybaritic. The Empress reversed likes to “live large” to the detriment of prudent self-discipline and the likely consequences should not be understated. As a much younger man I was thrilled to meet avatars of the reversed Empress in nightclubs for the mingled temptation and danger they embodied, but on the few occasions when it actually happened it did not turn out for the best. They usually dealt an emotional blow to the soft spot between the “rock” (my head) and that other “hard place.”