The Greater Trumps: (05) The Empress

She stands or sits enthroned, assured and powerful in a field of wheat, the queen of fertile seasons and the lady of rich lands. White is her raiment, and she is pleasant in all her ways. Her crown is of stars, and her rod is of the Cyprian metal. Her smile is the joyous reply to the sun's golden heat, and her touch is that of the kindly breezes. It is she who brings seeds to fruition, and this can be seen in her gentle and inviting curves.

Yet it is good for the wanderer to realise that she is indeed a Power, the Green Mother and the Lady. She is Fertility, and can withhold it; she is Action, and can frustrate it. She is the womb of every holt, the blaze on every hill - and he who walks in her lands, the lands of all the Earth, should tread lightly and with thoughtful care.

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There are few who are like this, and I have met many who are not. This aspect of the feminine is more Gaia than Aphrodite, and thus to be greatly honoured and revered. Robert Graves feared her; John Keats, whether he knew it or not, adored her:

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

I miss my childhood under the casuarina and the cypress. I miss the warm sun and the cut grass. It isn't that I cannot have these things now; it is that I am not the child I used to be.