The High Priestess

✦ 2. The High Priestess

✦ Associations

Water / Moon

✦ Keywords

Intuition, inner knowledge, the subconscious, self-sovereign, mysteries, secrets, psychic power.

✦ Quote

And that is what the intuition is for; it is the direct messenger of the soul. — Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves

✦ Meaning

✦ Charge of the Goddess

In the Charge of the Goddess, as adapted from Doreen Valiente by Starhawk in The Spiral Dance, the Goddess speaks: "And you who seek to know me, know that your seeking and yearning will avail you not, unless you know the mystery: for if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without." This mystery is the paradox of all seekers and the secret that sits at the core of the Tarot, which, like all divination, peers without to delve within. The High Priestess introduces and represents this dichotomy, sitting between two contrasting pillars before a bowl of water, presenting a locked box with no key. Here, we approach the threshold of the mystery but the key is not given. The High Priestess will not give it, for we must seek it out ourselves or miss the point entirely.

✦ Pomegranate and Inner Rivers

As the pomegranate, the fruit of the underworld, holds many seeds, so we each hold many mysteries. The High Priestess gestures inwards, and we go to seek the answers in the subterranean silt of our inner rivers where they wait. This process of delving is also the awakening of intuition, the sense of inner knowing with which we were all born but were taught to mistrust and diminish along the way, unwitting children of a patriarchal society bent on controlling all conduits to knowledge. In the High Priestess, and in the Tarot at large, we initiate the process of reclaiming that divine self-knowledge which is our birthright.

✦ Intuition as Key

Intuition, beyond all the symbols and glyphs and magical correspondences in the cards, is the key to the Tarot. Without intuition, all we have are keywords to regurgitate and tables of arcane information to point at arcane. With intuition, we hold the secret that infuses the Tarot with its magic. Before our inner eyes, a playing card becomes portal, the symbols breathe with life, and the surety echoes up through our bones with the knowing that only comes of intuition. In order to access this, we must first resist the empiricist's tidy sterile answers, quiet the doubts implanted by those who would rather we not trust ourselves, and soften our own left-brain insistence on finite textbook meaning. We must open instead to not knowing. We must open to mystery.

✦ Opening to Mystery

The Tarot, like Starhawk and Valiente's Goddess, demands that we first open to mystery before we can gain authentic knowledge. Through engaging with mystery, with intuition, we reclaim our realities, our possibilities, our dreams. The only way to true knowing is through the gate of mystery.

✦ Oracle and Cycles

There is no Tarot without intuition; there is no intuition without mystery; and the High Priestess is the oracle of both. The High Priestess invites us into our own depths, into the sovereignty of our inner realms, because that is where the only meaningful answers lie. Aligned with the Moon, the High Priestess embraces the cyclical nature of all things. Spanning the space between contrasting pillars, they know that all binaries are in fact spectrums, and they ecstatically embody those spectrums. They sit at the crossroads of inner and outer, day and night, above and below, this and that. They walk between the worlds guided only by the water-sound of their intuition streaming somewhere in the dark.

✦ Murky Vision

If much of this seems vague, murky, meaning slipping just beneath the surface like the shadow of an ocean beast, that's because it's supposed to. The High Priestess beckons us toward our unknown knowings. They are the eye that sees best when closed. In their bowl, the murky waters become a crying mirror for visions, and they perceive far more than if the water were clear.

✦ Note

Our image of the High Priestess is inspired by queer bruja, healer, and mental health advocate Emilia Ortiz.