The Emperor Tarot

The Emperor is the Tarot major arcanum number 4. 

The character drawn on this card represents a man who reached maturity and who is sitting on a throne. He has wide powers and besides the throne are a gold shield on which one can see an eagle. Everyone knows that eagle is the crowned bird, symbol of power.

The Emperor shows you that he never fears anything, he's self-confident and definitely leads his people.

This tarot card major arcanum is the one of triumph, of successful persons. 

All based on authority and self-confidence, the Emperor has several different meanings. Let's have a look at some of them:

The Emperor tarot in the right position:

• Authority
• Safety
• Self-confidence
• Success
• Prosperity
• Successful endeavours 

The Emperor tarot upside down:

• Ineffectiveness
• Meanness
• Brutality
• Arroguance

Troubles

Obviously most meanings can be interpreted depending on the spread the fortune-teller does for their consultants.

So that you better see how it works, we're going to make a fake tarot cards spread that will involve the Emperor. Let's say that our consultant asks us as to whether her husband will break up their marriage.

We beat the cards, and ask our consultant to "cut" the deck with her left hand - the one of her heart - and then selects 4 cards that we're going to place on the table as follows:

• 1st card: to the left
• 2nd card: to the right
• 3rd card: on top of the spread
• 4th card: at the bottom of our spread.

Now we're going to imagine the card that our consultant selected:

• 1st card: the Lovers
• 2nd card: the Emperor
• 3rd card: the Moon
• 4th card: the Chariot

Meaning  of this spread:

The Lovers symbolize the true love her husband has for our consultant, he knows she is the woman of his life... The Emperor; which is placed in a negative position (to the right means blocking) refuses to question himself and one can think he's fine with the current situation. The Moon represents the consultant and her questions, does he still love her, is he about to leave her for another woman? and so on... The fourth card; which is the Chariot  tells us that her husband is willing to leaver her forever.

Now that our consultant is very sad, what will happen?

While it's our job as fortune-tellers to always tell the truth, it's not our job to have our consultants sad and in despair.

This is the reason why we're going to do a synthesis of our spread in order to check and see as to whether we have an opportunity to reassure our consultant.

Here's how it works: we use numerology to do so and will sum up the number of the cards on the table:

• The Lovers --> 6
• The Emperor --> 4
• The Moon --> 18
• The Chariot --> 7

This will give us a total of 35. However, a tarot deck doesn't include a major arcanum number 35 so we're going to reduce the choice and sum up 3 + 5; which gives a result of 8.

8 is the number of the Justice. And justice is generally associated with things that relate to justice like divorce in this instance ; however, with the tarot cards, justice can also mean that our consultant will eventually find some balance in her life. Now we can do a new spread to check and see the kind of balance she's about to get: divorce or get back the love of her husband...

As you can see, the tarot cards don't always give you the answer you're looking for but you're always welcome to do some more spreads, just to reassure your consultant.