✨Just in — browse this month's new arrivals across incense, candles, stones and decks.✨

0 products
View all
The The Emperor card from the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot

On the card

A bearded figure on a stone throne carved with rams' heads, an ankh sceptre in hand, bare mountains behind him.

Upright

  • Structure
  • Authority
  • Boundaries

The card of the frame that holds a thing up: rules, order, a decision that stays decided. It invites you to consider where more structure would help and where you have been avoiding making the call.

Reversed

  • Rigidity
  • Control
  • No footing

Reversed, structure becomes the problem rather than the support — a rule kept past its usefulness, or a situation with no one willing to hold the shape at all.

About this deck

The artwork is the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith to Arthur Edward Waite's direction and first published in 1909. It has passed into the public domain, which is why it can be shown here in full — but it is her work, and the reason this deck became the one nearly every other deck answers to.

Everything You Need for the Practice

SHOP ALL DEPARTMENTS