The High Priestess

“She is like a cat in the dark
And then she is the darkness

She rules her life like a fine skylark
And when the sky is starless

All your life you’ve never seen
Woman taken by the wind
Would you stay if she promised you heaven?
Will you ever win?”

‘Rhiannon’ by Fleetwood Mac (Nicks)

Welcome to the inner circle!

My Tarot journal entry has lots of CAPITALISED prompts for the High Priestess card (lol): “stillness”, “stop and listen!”, “patience”. This is a card whose message I really need to let into my life, because I’m not always great at this.

I am resolutely not religious, but I also always think of the words to the famous Christian hymn when I see her in a reading:

“Breathe through the heats of our desire
Thy coolness and Thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm.

O still, small voice of calm.”

John Greenleaf Whittier

So for me, that’s the key lesson of this card: listen to your inner voice. She is wise beyond all knowing.

In ‘traditional’ High Priestess imagery, we generally see her presented as a mysterious, veiled figure; both literally and metaphorically shrouded. She is enthroned between two pillars (one black, and one white) with the crescent moon both cupped beneath her feet and crowned upon her head. While she is in many ways a symbol of ‘darkness’, the two moons bathing her in their soft light indicate her ability to illuminate things that we might otherwise not see. She is both mystery and knowledge. The world – both outside and within us – is opaque, and meaning is slippery, but that does not mean that enlightenment is impossible. The pillars can represent the changing and often contradictory nature of life, or a time when we are caught between two worlds, trying to decide which way to go. She hesitates between them, reminding us that when a hard decision presents itself, instead of rushing ahead we should always pause, and listen to what our instincts are telling us. To this extent, the High Priestess is not a card about indecision, but instead a card about knowing that a decision should not be made hastily, or without adequate knowledge or insight. She advises us to actively not act, because more needs to be known.

And what is it we need to know? In her hands she holds a pair of ancient scrolls, sometimes with ‘Tora’ upon them (both a nod to the Jewish Holy Book and a partial anagram of the word ‘Tarot’). Is this the knowledge we need? Perhaps. But behind her throne there is often a curtain, shielding us from even deeper, more personal knowledge of both ourselves and the universe. Dare we go beyond that curtain? Deep into the ocean of our hearts? She can help us pull back the veil if we let her.

The High Priestess isn’t just about waiting to make a decision until we’re in the know, though, she’s also about how we gain that knowledge in order to make that decision. If we compare her to the Hanged Man (also seen as about passivity/waiting) we can see her energy is actually very different. The Hanged Man doesn’t necessarily want to pause, but he knows he has to if he wants to see the world from a new perspective. And so he makes a necessary sacrifice. For the High Priestess, pausing isn’t any kind of sacrifice, it’s her natural state of being. She completely understands the needs for quiet moments of restful waiting. The need for a dawn and a dusk, an Autumn and a Spring. For times “inbetween”.

The Queen of the Inbetween

When studying the High Priestess, I got really into the pomegranate imagery that is so often depicted on the card. I was very invested in the Persephone myth as a teen, so it figures! In ancient mythology, Persephone is the beautiful daughter of Demeter, the Goddess of Harvest and Fertility, and Zeus, King of the Gods. Hades, God of the Underworld, falls wildly in love with her (as much as one can ‘fall in love’ with a teenaged girl you’ve never actually spoken to, I mean, FFS Hades, gross), and, according to Hesiod’s Theogony, is given permission by Zeus to abduct her. When she finds Persephone gone, Demeter flies into a desperate rage. Instead of tending to the world’s gardens, she roams the Earth searching for her kidnapped daughter, causing harvests to fail and the earth to grow barren and desolate. Such is the extent of the devastation caused by Demeter’s anger and grief, Zeus is compelled to force Hades to return Persephone to her mother. Hades complies with the order, but not before he tricks his new bride into eating a handful of pomegranate seeds. He knows that now she has partaken of the food of the Underworld, she will be obliged to spend a third of each year (the Winter months) down in the depths at his side.

And so it is. For four months out of twelve Persephone must return to the Underworld to take the throne beside her husband. During the time she is away from her mother, the normally abundant and joyous Demeter mourns her absence, causing fruit to wither and flowers to die, a.k.a. Winter.

It is perhaps not surprising then, that the High Priestess is strongly associated with the liminal figure of Persephone, and that cards often depict the lush, red, almost vulvic folds of the pomegranate fruit. The High Priestess is not just a card that represents hidden knowledge, then, but, more precisely, knowledge that we are afraid to know. The pomegranates are the burden Persephone must carry due to Hades’ deceit and trickery. They serve as a warning that we may not have a full picture of everything that is in play in any given situation, and that others may have hidden (and sometimes nefarious) motivations for keeping us in the dark. Likewise, the card may be drawing our attention to the secrets we keep from ourselves. Jessica Dore notes that when she sees this card in a spread she asks, “What about this issue is not being said?” The High Priestess card can be an indicator that something in the room is either not being said, or “may require a bit of decoding”.

However, the Persephone myth isn’t all doom and gloom, and neither is the High Priestess card (I mean, ovbs: she’s a lot of people’s favourite card!) The months she is with Hades, Persephone is like the seed in Winter; safe and germinating under the seemingly dead earth. Then she returns to Demeter every Spring, bringing the world violently and joyously back to life. In this way Persephone is both the black pillar and the white, the undead Queen of the Underworld as the bride of Hades, and the Goddess of Life as the daughter of Demeter.

This inbetween space, halfway between life and death, sleep and wakefulness, Winter and Summer, has led to some Tarot scholars viewing the High Priestess as ‘pregnant’. She can be seen as representing a metaphorical ‘womb’, a place where the seed of life is kept safe, waiting to blossom into knowing. Thus the High Priestess can signal the need for a pause where you give the seed of knowledge inside you time to ‘gestate’ into a real and full self-awareness. It’s interesting to note that the Hebrew letter assigned to the High Priestess card is Gimel (the Camel). Much like Persephone must traverse the Underworld to return safely to her mother each Spring, the camel must traverse the desert (carrying its secret store of life-giving water) to bring its rider back to safety. Yes, the secrets of the world (and the secrets we hold within) can be terrifying and scary, but we can trust in the energy of the High Priestess to carry us to the other side.

Someone who can lead the querent through the underworld (or carry them through the desert like a camel), from first card to last. Much like the High Priestess herself, a good Tarot reader can keep a querent from getting lost and help them to understand what they’re seeing in the mysterious land of the subconscious. The High Priestess occupies the same space as Persephone; she is secret knowledge, the promise of life, something which is yet sleeping, the seed in its velvety bed, the moment before you pee on the stick and know there is life growing inside you*.

The world is dark and terrifying in its fathomless unknownness, but your intuition is there, flaming torch in hand, illuminating the underworld, casting her soft glow on the inner architecture of your mind. The High Priestess is a call to listen to your guts and to “reclaim the irrational: to realise that it’s not a dirty word”, as Jen Cownie and Fiona Lensvelt explain. “Irrationality is part of us. It’s the instincts honed by a thousand generations. Irrationality is the home of our intuition. When we accept this aspect of ourselves, when we recognise that there are times when it should be embraced, we are, more often than not, rewarded for it. And maybe, just maybe, we open the door for magic – even if only of the smallest order”.

She is a liminal figure, and tells us the value of the inbetween, the pause between the intake of breath and the exhale. The wisdom in waiting.

I love a good spooky witchy High Priestess, which the above cards all deliver in spades. The unseeing, yet all-seeing eyes in Brooke Penrose’s figure. The closed-eyed ecstasy of the woman in the DruidCraft Tarot. And the eyes in the Light Seer’s Tarot had me going from ‘is that a print error?’ to ‘creepy’ to ‘urgh, I love it!’.

Given the links with the High Priestess and pomegranate seeds / early pregnancy, the idea of the pearl inside the (wonderfully vulvic) shell we see in the Spacious Tarot is amazing. And then when you look closer the pearl is actually the moon. This image manages to convey all the mystery, wisdom (hidden inner treasures), and feminine energy of the card, in my opinion. Also, thinking of Persephone’s dark time in the underworld being necessary to bring us Spring: the card reminds us no grit, no pearl. I also love how on-message the incorporation of the seashore is – it serves as liminal space (betwixt sea and land) and the tides are governed by the moon, just as menstrual cycles are. This card is so, so, so rich! I’ve spoken many times on this blog of my love for the Ink Witch Tarot. Part of the High Priestess’s mystery is her ability to think 10 moves ahead. If we stop and wait with her, and listen to what our inner voice is saying, we might be able to too.

True Colours

I also noticed there’s a wash of turquoises and purples in many of my High Priestess cards, so I checked if it meant something, and it does! Turquoise represents a time of learning self-acceptance and life lessons (also commonly seen on the Hierophant and the Hanged Man) and purple points to our spiritual selves and suggests guidance from a higher realm will be available (also commonly seen on the Emperor).

We can see some of these colours picked up in many of my favourite High Priestess cards. All three of the above cards are just fabulously unnerving, from the blank face of the Holloway Tarot‘s Priestess, to the skull mask of the Cursed Auguries Tarot‘s, to the bleeding wounds of Enys Guerros’ illustration for the 78 Tarot Ecological. The guidebook describes her as “opening her soul and heart to the world, reminding us of the power our intuition holds”.

But the High Priestess isn’t all creepy weirdness, her energy can also be found in the everyday, such as Anna K’s depiction of the phases of the moon. The creator writes that the High Priestess “knows that everything happens in cycles, and that bad things will pass, good things will come again, and vice versa”. I love the Cosmic Cycles Tarot’s portrayal of the High Priestess as Tarot reader, and Brooke Marie’s depiction of a woman studying with her cat (my kind of High Priestess energy!)

“The softest thing in the universe
Overcomes the hardest thing in the universe.
That without substance can enter where there is no room.
Hence I know the value of non-action.

Teaching without words and work without doing
Are understood by very few.”

Tao Te Ching

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*’life’ in a metaphorical sense, it is my opinion that the High Priestess is radically pro-choice, haha