Nature & her ways
It can be easy to become entranced with nature. It’s as if reality drags our focus into our surroundings at any available opportunity unless we force ourselves to concentrate on our personal development. To work with the Empress, it requires a broad view of the situation, and to remain impartial.
The Priestess path crosses the Empress, and with the Empress being referred to as a ‘Doorway’ lead to an understanding of the nature of the path in context of a passage way. As we travel along the path of the Priestess we can become entranced in superfluous happenings.
She is the sum of the spirit (Fool), the form that contains the spirit (Magician), and the expression of those combined energies (The Priestess). This is the seekers nature, which unfolds its story akin to most fantastic rose. It is the great shaper, and ultimately our limitation of expression (Our forms can only do so much, but we harness creativity to push those boundaries). This is the breadth and scope of what can manifest.
Nature gave us the faculties to excel in both beauty and horrors that come from the hands of humankind. As a people we are capable of incredible things both positive and negative, this is the scope of our nature. Our actions can yield fruit, and this path sets the limits for these possibilities.
Nature gave us tools, but no instruction on how to best use them. We stumble through the natural ignorance that is time.
We’ve used an extreme tone in writing for the Empress, this is to convey the serious respect commanded by this force. We cannot change our own natures, only be a custodian of it. If we dislike something about our nature, we’re blocked from growing, but also challenged to express among sometimes hostile environments.
Being natural
The Empress not only bars the way to the divine, but is an integral part of the divine’s expression in corporeal reality. It is the spark within the matter that animates everything. This spark can sometimes be sensed by the seeker, or even feel as though it is a partner to our soul. When we align with our natural state, we dance with the universe in ecstatic bliss. This is reflected in the Universe/World card, where the nature is fully acknowledged, understood, grounded, and appreciated as the gift it is.
Aligning with this nature isn’t easy. We get conditioned into a reality that seems divorced from nature initially. Skyscrapers, spaceships, computers, and just about anything else we can make ripped out of the very ground we stand on. The seeker has treacherous ground to navigate to reconcile the insanity of the direction the human race is running, and there’s little a single person can do. It seems at first. There are psychological barriers stopping the weak of will, the softest souls, from getting any sense of justice.
The walls that surround the soul & spark seem insurmountable, the terrors stacked against each and everyone of us. But these impressed images represent the latent power of our expression. A simple act today could topple massive structures in the future if aimed in the right way. This is where some of the majesty of nature shines through. All the tools you’ll need will come once your poise towards this wall of pain changes. Patience, prudence become established within the self, as if the great mother aspect begin to grow within the self.
The pain of the Earth
One of the harder aspects to accept is that we are all feeding from mother nature. She understand this, but accepting it is hard to swallow. We are like the chick within an egg consuming the supplies given to us for reasons unknown. We have to have faith in that process while we find out how we fit into this world.
It is easy to dismiss a fate or purpose when there are millions starving, homeless, and we are sat here surrounded by luxuries compared to others. Why us? Too much time on our hands? What’s the point?
That’s the call of the abyss. If we chose to ignore the call to aid nature in bringing the best out of us within the means supplied to us, then our fate will be sealed when we die, our souls corrupted, nature has no more need for those threads to progress towards a unified race of beings.
She understands we make mistakes, she knows our animal has a great degree of control over us, but conditioning pushes back on these natural states. Some with good cause, others are social conventions that vary from country to country and will need to be challenged if causes stress to the person suffering with it. At the time of writing this, there are huge changes in regards to sexuality and gender identities, and in some countries people are murdered for those differences. Consider seekers in those countries faced with handling something natural to themselves being punished. These types of situations should show us that even ideas that we currently work with might be outdated and restricting us.
The Abyss
During many of the card discussions, there is some digression into other areas that we feel are related. The abyss sometimes represented by an eleventh sphere called ‘Daath’. It’s worthy of discussion here, as the abyss has to be passed over for energies passing downwards and upwards.
We don’t have to worry so much about the energy descending, as that’s an act of divinity akin to being struck by lightening and no point in even trying to figure that out at this point humanities spiritual progression.
The ascension is fraught with danger, but the allure of contacting the divine within oneself is a tempting leap to make. We think it’s our choice, but when we dig deep, it was in our nature to make that leap. Regardless of that, the initial attempts by the seeker usually end in what seems like a catastrophic disaster. Huge mistakes, massive dangers, and usually leaving people wondering what on earth was going on in the seekers mind to take such a risk. These falls can reduce a persons ability to recover quickly, and end up in a huge phase of self reflection and hopefully realignment.
Until we test ourselves, we don’t really know what we are capable of.
The abyss tends to throw people who fail into aspects as defined by Saturn. This is a dulled brilliance, set to repeat itself until the person learns. The rings aptly representing the circular trap that failure can bestow upon a person.
Personal experience of Saturn vary, but few of them pleasant. It’s a serious tone to the conscious struggle. Everything becomes a pale grey, leaden progress, and solemn. Some find they are buried under a huge weight of troubles, in the depths of the sphere of Binah. This almost feels like a punishment, but is in fact a supreme grounding that aims to rectify and point the soul to another destination. Reality shifts and changes, so must we.
Pulling the self out of the pit of despair is no easy feat. We have to reach out for help sometimes, or carve a new path in a new direction. Self reinvention becomes possible to bring the nature out in a different way.
The initial fall is the hardest though, it’s not unusual for a seeker to be knocked aside for years – this should not be seen as an issue though, and the process is a natural one needed to rebuild something different with the help of the divine. We fail, but this is the doorway which the divine is able to now manifest as soon as we appeal for a better path that is laid out by the divinity itself in a natural way that isn’t based on human will.
Beneficent
This is the card of cultivation of the paternal mother nature within us all. This nature brings out both stern and loving natures within the person. If the Fool emerges the other side with their humour intact, their loving nature still freely able to see the beauty in nature, they will have probably established the seed of the Empress within them.