Mother Quote by Arthur E. Waite

Waite’s language is doing the classic occultist two-step: it sounds clinical, even anthropological, while smuggling in a full metaphysical program. “The Empress” here isn’t a character so much as a symbolic engine. By tying her to “universal fecundity,” Waite scales motherhood into cosmology. Fertility stops being a private, bodily matter and becomes a principle that animates everything - crops, creativity, desire, empire. The phrase “connected with the ideas of” is careful, almost evasive; it positions the claim as part of a received tradition rather than Waite’s own invention, which is exactly how esoteric authority often works.

“Universal” matters: it launders a very particular gendered archetype into something that can pass as timeless. The Empress in tarot is typically coded as feminine abundance, nurture, sensuality, nature’s surplus. Waite’s framing softens the erotic and political implications of an “Empress” (power, hierarchy, possession) and redirects her into a safer Victorian metaphysics: generative energy as moral and cosmic good.

Then he adds “and in a general sense with activity,” a telling pivot. Fecundity can be read as passive receptivity; “activity” corrects that, insisting the feminine principle is not merely womb-like but operative, productive, world-making. In context - Waite’s early-20th-century project of systematizing tarot within a Christian-tinged occult revival - this reads as an attempt to stabilize symbols into neat categories: Empress as life-force, Emperor as structure, all of it filed into a spiritually respectable taxonomy.