There could not be a greater contrast between the Emperor and the card preceding it. The Empress is naked; the Emperor is armoured to the hilt with insignia, uniform and medals, along with his own riot police force. This is not a marriage made in heaven, as we shall see.
The swastika in the top right panel also emphasises that the power the Emperor represents is one of "power over"; that is, of dominion over the populace. The Chalice pack makes no apologies for presenting the Emperor in this manner; the most negative manifestation of this card is precisely about the jackboot in the face, and, on more mundane levels, about despotism within the workplace, or even within the home.
John Michell, in City of Revelation, asserts that the swastika partakes of the same essence of the number 666, the mark of the beast from the biblical Book of Revelation. However, it is only where there are severe imbalances within society that this power becomes truly corrupt and dangerous. Both the swastika and the number of the beast, from Michell's cosmogony as he saw it, correspond to a natural tendency, both within the individual and within the body politic, to seek a ruler, or a centre. This centre corresponds in astrology to the Sun, which for most individuals describes their ego or self, and on a mundane level becomes the king or emperor of a nation.
This manifests most clearly within the architecture of most city states, where all roads lead to the secular power and pomp of Rome. It can be witnessed in the architecture of Buckingham Palace and at Versailles.
The danger within this card is that the Self can all too easily crystallise into the tyranny of Ego or totalitarianism. The individual, or the state, then always has to be right and cannot brook any signs of opposition or independent thought or culture, as this may prove that the Emperor is not omnipresent after all. This is surely what the Gnostics had in mind where they have the creator Ialdobaoth cry out, "There is no other god but me!".
The Chalice pack also suspects that there is considerable significance in the way the Emperor follows the Empress. On one level, this can be seen to depict the succession of the patriarchal sky-gods over the peaceful matriarchal societies - the Age of Aries over that of Taurus. The frescos discovered within the Neolithic ruins of Çatal Hujuk, for instance, depicted several bull-gods. Later on, the Bible described what happened to the Golden Calf. Certain anthropologists have suggested that the older goddess-worshipping civilisations made themselves redundant as their methods of storing resources and information grew more efficient. These latter moves brought about the growth of the city and, with this, the city walls of self-protection from the hordes, and the desire to expand and to spread its culture. No wonder the Emperor is armoured!
Still, it again has to be emphasised that the need to control situations is not always a bad thing - in small doses! Like the Magician, the Emperor is essentially pro-active and, even more than the former card, will ride through a situation where others may well give in to habit or to inertia. Most typically, he will emerge in a spread as an individual in the querent's life who possesses great leadership qualities as well as courage in acting, from a position of power, while always having the potential to act in very controlling ways, or to misuse the power he wields, over the lives of others.