The High Priestess

The High Priestess and the veil

The High Priestess sits between two pillars, one black and one white. The black pillar carries the letter B, and the white one a J. Behind her hangs a veil, covered with palm leaves and pomegranates. She wears a horned crown with a white globe in it, like a full moon. A crescent moon lies at her feet. On her lap is a scroll with the word TORA, and her cloak hides part of it.

The Magician raised one arm and pointed with the other. She makes no gesture at all. She is trump II, so if you follow the trumps as a journey, she is the second figure the Fool comes to, straight after that busy table. You could try looking at her the way she looks at you: without hurry.

• The MagicianTrump I

The image

The pillars come from the Bible. The First Book of Kings describes the temple of King Solomon. At its porch stood two bronze pillars. The one on the right was called Jachin, and the one on the left Boaz. Their tops were shaped like lilies, and rows of pomegranates hung around them. Arthur Edward Waite labels them simply "J. and B." On Pamela Colman Smith's card the pomegranates hang on the veil behind her instead.

The veil hides whatever lies behind her. At its edges you can see a strip of pale blue. It could be sky, or water. You can't see past her. Maybe that is why she sits there.

Waite wrote that her scroll is "partly covered by her mantle, to shew that some things are implied and some spoken". He also called her "the Queen of the borrowed light". The Moon has no light of its own. It shines with light borrowed from the Sun. Her whole card is moonlit, in pale blue, white and grey. At the bottom her robe spills off the throne and runs out of the picture like water.

The old name for this card was stranger still. Waite listed it: "the Pope Joan, or Female Pontiff". Pope Joan was a woman in a medieval legend who, the story goes, dressed as a man and rose to be pope. Another old name, "the Mother, or Pope's Wife", Waite rejected. He saw her as "the Secret Tradition".

The inner journey

If the Magician is the "I" waking up, the part of you that knows what it is doing, the High Priestess sits at the edge of what that "I" can know. Carl Jung thought most of the mind is hidden from us, and he called the hidden part the unconscious. One layer is personal, made of what you forgot or pushed away. Below it, he thought, lies a layer everyone shares, the collective unconscious. Its images turn up in dreams, myths and art.

Jung also described an inner figure who can lead a man into that hidden world. He called her the anima, from the Latin word for soul. Many readers see the High Priestess as this guide. She is a woman at a doorway, holding a book she doesn't open for you.

So the Fool, who has just learned to act, meets someone who doesn't act. She waits. What she knows, she knows the way you know a dream before you put it into words.

Along the road she can look like a gate to pass through. You could also try staying at the gate. Carry a question for a day and let it stay a question. Notice what comes to you once you stop pushing for an answer. You could treat her card the same way, and leave part of it unexplained.

Across traditions

In the Golden Dawn's tables the High Priestess gets Gimel, the third of the Hebrew letters, and the Moon. Her secret title in Book T is "The Priestess of the Silver Star".

Waite went further, into the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. He wrote that her "truest and highest name" is Shekinah, "the co-habiting glory". In Jewish thought the Shekinah is the presence of God dwelling in the world. Waite also called this card, in some ways, "the highest and holiest of the Greater Arcana".

There is another way into the pomegranates. The Greeks told of Persephone, daughter of the harvest goddess Demeter. Hades, king of the dead, carried her down to the underworld. When the gods made him let her go, he slipped her a pomegranate seed to eat. Because she had eaten there, she had to go back. So she spends a third of every year below, and the rest above.

The Romans called her Proserpine, and in 1874 Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted her under that name. In his picture, now at Tate in London, she holds the pomegranate, bitten open, and looks aside. You could set her beside the High Priestess. Both women sit on the edge of two worlds. Both hold something that ties them to the hidden side.

Try this

Cover half of the card above with your hand or a sheet of paper. Look at the half you can see for a minute. Then guess what lies under your hand before you lift it. Did you guess right? Notice whether the hidden half felt empty or full while you couldn't see it. You could try the same with something you are carrying: leave half of it unsaid for a day.

Questions to sit with

• What is written on the part of the scroll you can't see?
• What might lie behind the veil? Do you want to know?
• Where in your life are you standing between two pillars?
• What do you know that you have never said out loud?
• If she spoke one sentence to the Fool, what would it be?

The film

No film for this card yet.