Revisiting The Emperor with Riches

Weekly Forecast for 10/7

The Emperor is making a second appearance in a month, reprising the exact same spot they last appeared: at the very end of our spread. It’s as if they’ve come back to offer a second chance. Maybe we weren’t ready to fully harness this card’s imposing strength and determination. Maybe we needed more time to figure out what stability, order, and structure really mean to us - not in an abstract way or in a way that cleaves to the status quo, but truly what we feel in our bones is right for us and our lives.

The cyclical nature of tarot is one of the things that I love about it most. As an esoteric system it invites us to ask better questions, to try and try again, and to see life as a process that’s constantly unfolding. No right answers and no wrong ones, either. We don’t figure out a card and learn its lesson once; we get to know it more deeply through all the twists and turns of our life.

We just finished a week that ended with The Empress and this has me thinking that the lessons we’ve learned over the past seven days are setting us up to re-approach The Emperor with focus and, most excitingly, actions that yield results. Look to the past seven days to see how you practiced inhabiting your power. The Empress, unlike The Emperor, looks lusciously comfortable in their authority. Lounging on a pile of decadent pillows amidst the splendors of nature is not an image we associate with power in our culture, so it might take some digging to identify how you advocated for yourself and cultivated the situations that work best for you. It may have looked like resting, opting out, and waiting for what’s right to come alone. Or playing, embracing pleasure, holding court for others, or caring for people, places, and communities.

As we step into the week, we’re met with how complex, rich, and, yes, chaotic, our daily life can be. The Ten of Pentacles is a cacophony of action. The card is packed with characters, human and animal, and looking at it we can almost feel the beauty, burden, struggle, and joy of all the ties that bind us: our relationships with family, our duties to each other, our connection to our ancestors, our relationship to place. I could go on! But I won’t; this is one of the cards that almost everyone gets on a visceral level. Life is truly full this week, but it’s beautiful and meaningful if we take a moment to step back from the fray.

I can’t think of a card that can better prepare us for the endearing, demanding chaos of the Ten of Pentacles than The Empress. If you feel overwhelmed, simply return back to this card and remember the practices you’ve been devoting yourself to that give you strength and joy - a true presence in your own body. These can help get us through the busy fray of the week while reminding us that it’s a privilege to be here at all, dancing in the mess of a full life.

Most fascinatingly, our central card is what I semi-facetiously call “The Empress-lite,” the Nine of Pentacles. We may be finding more accessible ways to bring the power of this major arcana card into our daily life. Dive into the fray this week and see what you’re really working with. It’s likely that there’s a way to work with, rearrange, or capitalize on some of the pieces already in play so that you can have a calmer, more prosperous situation. From rearranging your daily schedule for more calm or creative time to using your existing resources to fund or form a new venture, this week is full of opportunities to grow whatever aspects of the pentacles suit you’re wanting to cultivate - money, material resources, physical health, sexuality, and/or ritual.

It’s also possible that the overwhelm at the beginning of the week uncovers something that needs to go; in getting frustrated or stressed we can find the one pentacle to subtract in order to reach the more peaceful abundance of the nine. This is fun math! Try not to let the bustling complexity of the Ten of Pentacles stress you out - just one small tweak it all it takes to get to a much more expansive place.

By the end of the week we’re ready to engage with The Emperor again. Because these two pentacles cards are so far along their sequence (and because we came into the week on the heels of The Empress), this feels more like a coming into power than a confrontation with power. In a sense, we’re being given a chance to codify the skills, protocols, and structures we’ve been organically adopting. Notice what works for you (not what you think should work for you or, even worse, someone else thinks should work for you) and take steps to make these a central part of your life. Be bold about it, too. The Emperor thrives on clear boundaries, claiming territory, and rules that give life structure. Doing this on a solid foundation of experience (the pentacles) and deeply felt meaning and power (The Empress) is a true recipe for enduring and authentic change.

This week embrace:

• The hustle-and-bustle of daily life

• Caring for your family, relationships, home, finances

• Making small edits to your schedule so that you can feel calm and empowered

• Prioritizing rest and comfort as valuable sources of your power and energy

• Investing in/making changes that help keep the life you truly want going. This is a fun energy where we get to make our own rules from a place of wisdom and creativity.

This week avoid:

• Throwing your hands up in overwhelm

• Getting tempted to make radical change when a little tweak could be just what you need

• Shirking duties and tasks, especially financial ones

• Ceding your power and agency - letting others write the rules of your life for you