Reflections on an Emperor Year
This last year was an Emperor year for me. Are you familiar with the concept of tarot year cards? I’m really into it, so I have a whole section of my website devoted to my writings on this. Check it out if you want to learn more about which tarot year card you are currently in and how to use that energy to grow and evolve in the year ahead.
For now, it’s enough to know that using tarot year cards is a practice that combines numerology with tarot to explain a progression of personal development. I use a 9 year system that cycles through cards 1-9 of the major arcana. These foundational cards spiral throughout our lives in a beautiful wheel of self evolution and spiritual growth. Working with your tarot year card can help you align with the current lessons and growth edges that you can lean into in the next year in order to mature as a person and spiritual being.
So, my birthday was earlier this month, July 8th to be exact. Using the day and month of your birth combined with the current year gives you the number of your tarot year card. Here is how it works for me:
7 + 8 + 2 + 0+ 2 + 4 = 23 which reduces to 2 + 3 = 5
The Emperor card from the Rider Waite Smith deck
That means I’ve ended an Emperor year and I’m onto a Hierophant year now. I’ve found, as I’ve lived and written about the tarot year card cycle over the last 9 years, that tarot year cards are often slow to manifest. It’s over the course of the whole year, and sometimes months into the next year of my life, that I see how the energy of the tarot year card has shaped, changed, and evolved me and my life circumstances.
That slowness is why I like the tarot year card system so much. It shows the long arc of personal evolution over time. It makes me feel like there is no rush, it’s perfectly natural and normal to take nine years to look at and learn a lesson from every angle. I’m mostly the same from day-to-day, but over the course of a lifetime, I’m becoming more myself, deepening my wisdom, and living out my soul purpose.
The tarot year cards will spiral back through my experience again and maybe I’ll repeat old lessons and take the next steps on others. That takes the pressure off. There’s no mandate to get it all done now and get it all done right, or else! There are more chances and there is more time. We don’t need to rush through life or get ahead of it. We can just live in the moment and learn what we can from it with the resources and knowledge we currently possess.
Today, I’d like to reflect and write about five ways that Emperor energy showed up for me last year. If you’re interested in learning more about The Emperor tarot card and how to interpret it’s meaning, read on! (Or read on if you’re just interested in learning more about me and how my year went ;)
1. Building Physical Structures
One of The Emperor’s characteristics is that he manifests ideas into reality. He creates real physical things you can touch. He likes foundations and building structures upon those foundations. He makes things solid and stable. Therefore this archetype can often show up for people as a building of physical structures.
Building came up for me again and again during my Emperor year as I took on more complicated and longer construction work jobs. I work sporadically on special projects doing acoustic sound solutions for a construction company. During my Emperor year, I worked on a magical theater renovation, an innovative science building at a private college, and a swimming pool at a beautiful retirement community. Working with my hands, building acoustical fabric panels, creating comfortable physical spaces for large numbers of people to enjoy, were all part of how the Emperor showed up in my life last year.
The Emperor tarot card from the Shadowscapes deck.
2. Focus on Home and Creating a Safe Space
As card 4 of the tarot, The Emperor also strongly correlates with the 4th house in astrology which is all about home and family. So an Emperor year can be one when home projects are strongly emphasized. This could be buying a home, building a home, renovating a home, adding onto a home, decorating a home, etc. It could even be rearranging the furniture! Whatever takes a space from a building to a home.
My partner and I did lots of projects around the home this year, as his homestead is still under construction. We put in new garden trellises, continued working on a new outbuilding, cleaned out the shed, resurfaced the driveway, screened in the porch, built a new worktable for the porch, put a new countertop in the kitchen, dug out a pond, made new trails through the blackberries, and planted lots of new trees and shrubs. And that’s just the stuff I can think of off the top of my head!
Even beyond doing projects around the home, simply creating a welcoming and safe environment is often part of an Emperor year. When I first moved in with my partner, the house felt like “his house”. This happened shortly before my last birthday, so right before my Emperor year started. Then slowly, over every single month of the last year, it’s starting to feel more like “our home”. Sure, he owns it and it’s financially his, but with us working together on it, it is a space that feels inviting and suited to both of us.
3. Deepening Commitments
Moving in with my partner and creating this shared home shows a deepening of commitment in my relationship. This increase in commitment is something you often see in relationships during an Emperor year. For some people it is deciding to date exclusively, or to get engaged or married, or to start a business together, etc. It’s somehow taking some next step in a relationship. It doesn’t really matter what the step is, just that you’re feeling more serious and invested in your partnership. The Emperor is nothing if not a serious and down-to-earth energy!
Commitment deepening isn’t exclusive to relationships, though. For example, I also felt more committed to my business, The Willow Path Tarot, in the last year. I spent more time working on my business, particularly when it came to developing a consistent writing schedule. Sure, it’s only been about 2 months that I’ve been able to stick with it but that’s a start. Even though it came together just in the last month of my Emperor year, I want to believe that this commitment will last and you’ll be here reading my weekly blog posts for years to come. This self belief goes along with another Emperor theme that emerged in my life in the last year (number 5 on this list).
4. Leadership and Career Advancement
The Emperor card from The Wild Unknown deck.
Another Emperor characteristic is leadership. Yes, of course the Emperor is a ruler (of your own personal empire of one!), but every really good ruler is also a leader. The ruler commands, while the leader directs, shows, encourages, and transforms their followers. A ruler demands respect while a leader inspires trust. Both have power, but while the ruler’s is bestowed by title, the leader works hard to earn authority.
I found leadership energy showing up for me this year at my job. Not through assuming a leadership role myself, but by needing to research leadership! I also worked part-time at a library software company where I collected training materials for librarians online and organized it for them to find more easily. One aspect of librarianship that everyone needed training on was leadership. So I got really deeply into the the study of leadership and how leaders can be trained.
Your tarot year card energy can show up in unexpected ways like this too. It wasn’t that I was taking on a leadership role, but I was still learning about leadership and it fascinated me!
Another career aspect of my Emperor year was that I got a promotion at this library software company job. Increased authority and control in the work place is a common way for Emperor energy to manifest during it’s year. I was given more hours and higher pay! It was great! I finally felt like I had a stable financial situation where a job I enjoyed paid me sufficiently to meet my expenses. Another unexpected twist was that this didn’t last long! The company decided to pivot just one quarter after my promotion and my contract was not renewed for the next quarter- the job ended just as my Emperor year ended.
That shows you that just because something manifests during a particular tarot year card year, that doesn’t mean it will endure! Some things will start right at the beginning of the year and you may not even notice them. Other things will manifest in the last month of your year and really knock your socks off. And of course, any which way in between those is also possible too. Remember, tarot year card energy is a long arc pointing towards self development over your lifetime.
5. Mindset Work
The Emperor also indicates self-confidence and owning your personal power. He knows how to lead himself and how to rule himself. The decision to increase my self confidence was actually a rational decision that I made on purpose at the beginning of my Emperor year. I considered the various aspects of self development that The Emperor could assist me with and chose to focus on increasing my experience of self worth and self acceptance.
This is one of the advantages of knowing what tarot year card you are in at the moment. When you know what the Universe is giving you special assistance with during the year, you can lean into that to make more progress than you might make without that knowledge. You’ll feel a natural flow and draw to the energy of your tarot year card in the background hum of your year. I really felt like the Emperor had my back as I worked to increase the positive perception of myself during the year.
Well folks, that’s all for now. I hope you enjoyed learning about how The Emperor year card can show up during an Emperor year and how that worked out for me. If you want to know anything more about tarot year cards, check out that section of my website here, or just send me an email and ask me any questions you have- thewillowpathtarot@gmail.com will go direct to me!
Now on to explore the energy of The Hierophant…