Side Notes
by BB Soto
The thoughts that don’t make the main text—but matter anyway ♥️
All Side Notes
Tarot Symbolism: The Star Crown & Astrology
“ A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head."
—Revelations 12:1
Tarot Symbolism: Stars
For as long as humans have looked up at night to watch the twinkling lights glitter against the black backdrop of space, humans have wondered at them and ascribed them mystical significance. Many cultures across the globe, going back as far as the historical record allows, believed stars encapsulated our risen souls after death, or an unborn soul, and in some cases were thought to house angels or deities. Across the board, though, there has been an otherworldly idea of their existence.
Tarot Symbolism: The Empress
“She is above all things universal fecundity and the outer sense of the Word.”
—Arthur Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, 1909
To say the Empress is a fertility goddess archetype isn’t quite capturing the depth of her essence. When Waite describers her as “universal fecundity,” he is bestowing her with the possession of not only the ability to be fertile, but to produce and reproduce in plentitude.
It’s the difference between a woman who has one or two children—she had to be fertile enough to become pregnant and therefore had the ability—and the fecund woman who would be the mother with thirteen children.
No, the Empress is more than just fertility. She is the be all and end all of a nature/mother/love/fertility goddess. She isn’t just the mother of new life personified; she is the action that brings about new life personified. Even more, she is the energetic force that drives all creation and growth through all through all seasons through all the years—she is the force that turns that seasonal wheel.