The Emperor

UPRIGHT

The Emperor sits on a stone throne carved with rams' heads, the bare red mountains behind him. He is structure: the law, the boundary, the discipline by which a world is kept from coming apart. The Empress grows; the Emperor protects what she has grown. To draw him is to be reminded that order, applied well, is itself a form of love.

REVERSED

Reversed, the Emperor is authority that has hardened into tyranny, or the absence of any structure where structure is needed. The card can name the petty king, the controlling father, the institution that exists to perpetuate itself. It can also speak to a querent who refuses any external order at all and is, as a result, unable to build anything that lasts.

Return to the full deck, or draw the cards and see The Emperor in context.