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The High Priestess

MAJOR ARCANA · II

The High Priestess is card II of the major arcana. Between two pillars, one dark and one light, a woman sits quietly with a scroll in her lap. Upright, she stands for intuition, stillness and inner wisdom; reversed, for secrets, assumptions and a closed heart.

Name and number

Upright meaning

Keywords: intuition, stillness, inner wisdom, mystery, waiting

If the Magician acts on the world outside, the High Priestess looks within. She does not move or speak; she simply sits.

The upright High Priestess stands for a wisdom that comes before words and reasons. It is read as permission not to rush to an answer, and to listen to your inner voice and to small doubts. She often appears around study and research, time spent thinking alone, and things that have not yet come to the surface. Drawn for another person, she can stand for someone calm and thoughtful who does not show their true feelings easily.

Reversed meaning

Keywords: secrets, assumptions, a closed heart, surface understanding

Reversed, the High Priestess's stillness is read as having closed in on itself.

Shutting yourself away and keeping people at a distance, or keeping important things hidden. Or losing the line between intuition and assumption, and filling in what you cannot see with imagination. It can also mean skimming knowledge and believing you understand. It is read as a time to pause and check what you know and what you do not.

What the picture shows

• The dark and light pillars: said to be the pillars at the entrance of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, marked "B" (Boaz) and "J" (Jachin) in the Rider–Waite–Smith deck. She sits between paired opposites: light and dark, seen and hidden.
• The scroll: in the Rider–Waite–Smith deck it bears the word "TORA," and it is half hidden by her robe, read as wisdom that is not wholly revealed.
• The crescent at her feet and her crown: a crown recalling the moon's phases, and a crescent: signs of the moon goddess, of what changes, and of the unconscious.
• The veil of pomegranates: we cannot see beyond it. Pomegranates stand for abundance and for secrets not yet opened.
• The cross on her breast: a sign of faith, and of what joins heaven and earth.

History

The High Priestess is one of the cards whose origins are least clear.

In the fifteenth-century Italian Visconti–Sforza deck, a woman in a nun's habit wearing the papal triple crown sits holding a book. Some scholars have suggested she was modeled on Maifreda da Pirovano, a nun connected with the Visconti family. Others link her with the medieval legend of "Pope Joan."

In the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Tarot of Marseille she is still La Papesse, a woman in a triple crown with an open book. With the Pope, the Emperor and the Empress, she was one of four cards representing sacred and worldly authority.

At the end of the eighteenth century, Court de Gébelin took the card to be a priestess of the Egyptian goddess Isis. Following this view, the Rider–Waite–Smith deck renamed her "the High Priestess," replaced the papal crown with a lunar crown and the book with a scroll. The Christian pope became a priestess guarding a temple of mysteries.

Correspondences

Previous and next cards

• Previous: 1 The Magician
• Next: 3 The Empress
• The major arcana

Lucky colors for The High Priestess