The Emperor: tarot card meaning

In A. E. Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), the Emperor upright means: Stability, power, protection, realization; a great person; aid, reason, conviction; also authority and will. Reversed: Benevolence, compassion, credit; also confusion to enemies, obstruction, immaturity.

The picture

“He has a form of the Crux ansata for his sceptre and a globe in his left hand. He is a crowned monarch: commanding, stately, seated on a throne, the arms of which are fronted by rams' heads. He is executive and realization, the power of this world, here clothed with the highest of its natural attributes. He is occasionally represented as seated on a cubic stone, which, however, confuses some of the issues. He is the virile power, to which the Empress responds, and in this sense is he who seeks to remove the Veil of Isis; yet she remains virgo intacta. It should be understood that this card and that of the Empress do not precisely represent the condition of married life, though this state is implied. On the surface, as I have indicated, they stand for mundane royalty, uplifted on the seats of the mighty; but above this there is the suggestion of another presence. They signify also (and the male figure especially) the higher kingship, occupying the intellectual throne. Hereof is the lordship of thought rather than of the animal world. Both personalities, after their own manner, are "full of strange experience," but theirs is not consciously the wisdom which draws from a higher world. The Emperor has been described as (a) will in its embodied form, but this is only one of its applications, and (b) as an expression of virtualities contained in the Absolute Being, but this is fantasy.” A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, 1910

Upright

Stability, power, protection, realization; a great person; aid, reason, conviction; also authority and will.

Reversed

Benevolence, compassion, credit; also confusion to enemies, obstruction, immaturity.

In one line

Stability, power, protection: the frame that holds. (Esbat's own summary of Waite's meaning and picture.)

Where it sits in the deck

The Emperor is card IV of the 22 Major Arcana, the trumps. Before it comes The Empress; after it, The Hierophant.

In Esbat

Esbat deals a card of the day, face down until you turn it, and holds all 78 cards in the 1910 pictures with Waite's meanings, upright and reversed. The Emperor can be shared as a picture. All 78 tarot card meanings.

Sources

Meanings and picture descriptions: A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London: Rider, 1910), public domain, checked against the Wikisource transcription. Picture: Pamela Colman Smith, 1910, public domain. Like the app, this page records what the book says; it does not promise outcomes.

Last updated October 25, 2026.

Esbat: Tarot & Book of Shadows, on Google Play

A card of the day, face down until you turn it, and all 78 cards in the 1910 pictures with Waite's meanings, upright and reversed. For Android.

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