4:   The Emperor

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BOTA (Builders of the Adytum)

Universal Waite

1.   Fatherhood; responsibility. 2.   Stability (social structure). 3.   Government, and governmental authority (sometimes oppressive). 4.   Getting things under control; giving orders (think of Donald Trump building the border wall).     The Emperor creates order and stability. 5.   Law enforcement; the creation of boundaries. 6.   Reason and logic.

COMMENTS:

"An accumulation of experience has led you to a place where you are confident about your decisions."

I think of this as the "Father Knows Best" card.

"Pay attention to the rules of society rather than the direct experience of nature."

If you were the President of the United States, you should expect this card to show up in your reading (or choose it to be your Significator).

What Arthur Edward Waite says about this card (in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot): 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 axe 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.