The Golden Dawn assigned the third trump the letter Daleth, the planet Venus, and the fourteenth path of the Tree of Life, joining Chokmah to Binah, the horizontal path across the top of the Tree, between the two supernal parents. Like all such assignments this one dates from the late nineteenth century and rests on Eliphas Levi's system of the 1850s, which in turn rests on the Comte de Mellet's 1781 pairing of the trumps with the Hebrew alphabet. The Venus attribution is the least contested part of the whole apparatus, because it agrees with what the picture had always suggested anyway.
In practice the card is read across a consistent band: abundance, growth already under way, creative work bearing fruit, nurture, and material comfort. A second and slightly different sense treats her as authority exercised through provision rather than through command, which distinguishes her usefully from the Emperor rather than merely feminising him.
The readings most often lost are the harder ones. Nurture that has become smothering, abundance that has made effort unnecessary, and a comfort that quietly forecloses change are all within the card's range, and Waite's reversed meanings gesture at them. Readers who do not use reversals generally get there by context: an Empress surrounded by cards of stagnation says something different from an Empress beside the Ace of Wands. Both approaches reach the same place, and the disagreement between them is about mechanism rather than meaning. What neither approach supports is the sentimental habit of treating the Empress as unambiguously benign; she is the card of what grows, and not everything that grows is wanted.