III · The Empress

The Empress is fecundity, reproduction—sexy time. Ask, "What is the meaning of life?" and the empress will tell you—babies and family. They are, after all, such little miracles, each and every one. Is that what you want? Is that what other people around you want? Making as many copies of yourself as you can. People say it's the most selfless act—to make genetic reproductions of themselves. How selfish are your genes? Wag.

For her the meaning of life is physical reproduction be it the cotton seeds floating in the summer forest or tiny octopuses floating in the waters of the ocean, RNA or DNA, by hook or by crook—she will make more babies. Ask a biologist why she bothers with sex at all, when cloning would be so much simpler, and one good answer is parasites. Every child shuffled from two parents is a new lock the old keys don't fit. The Empress runs so fast because something is always chasing her. Unlike the High Priestess she cares not for the arcane secrets of the world. Unlike the Magician she cares not for new ideas of noetic reproduction. Give her the lustful juices of meiosis and mitosis, sex and birth. She is both lover and midwife. Through her the selfish gene finds its greatest expression. She interacts with the world via consumption and visceral reconstruction. She is the octopus mother who stops eating to guard her eggs and dies soon after they hatch. She is the hive queen who turns honey into thousands of eggs. Where the Magician obsesses over the production of new ideas, she has all the meaning she needs in her gonads—her ovaries is all the meaning she needs. She does not seek to make it new, only to remake another copy perpetually repeating the cycle of birth and death. She is the reproduction of the physical body. When we speak of the selfish gene, we are speaking of the Empress—the impulse to reproduce at any cost. She prefers pot roast to cosmology, casserole to chemistry. Malthus be damned, she'll make more babies as long as she has enough food. She swings her X like a mace, her shopping cart like a tank in Stalingrad. If she had her way, you'd have four kids by 30 and your profiles would be dedicated to baby pictures. It is never quiet. There is laughter at the sheer fact of being alive. Life flows through her. She doesn't strain to control herself. She is the easiest Epicurean to satisfy—give her food and she's happy, give her sex and she is satisfied, give her babies and the meaning of life has been fulfilled. There is no boundary between her and nature. She sits in the garden and she is the garden.