Today’s card is one that I have always been interested in, I don’t think I can say why exactly, but in every deck it always stands out, as if it is calling to me. Lots of people are drawn to the Death card in a deck, or sometimes it’s The Devil or The Lover’s that make or break a deck for someone, but for me it’s The High Priestess who keeps calling out to me, taunting me with the secrets she holds. I see her as representative of why I wish to use Tarot, to learn more about life’s mysteries and to look beyond the obvious surface of the situations I find myself in, to what is hiding beneath.

The High Priestess is card number 2 in the Major Arcana and stands for mystery, potential, pyscic awareness and all things unconscious. She comes to tell us to look deeper, both within ourselves and in the world around us, to see what could be, to seek what is concealed or hidden, and to open ourselves to our own intuition. By doing so we can begin to trust our inner voice and in turn become aware of a larger reality!

In the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot we see a mysterious dark haired woman sitting before a veil, in between two stone pillars representative of ‘Boaz’ and ‘Jakin’, the two pillars in the Hebrew temple in Jerusalem. The dark  pillar here represents passivity and mystery, while the white represents conciousness and action. And she sits between them both. What I see as important however is that the letters inscribed upon the pillars are of there opposite colour, showing that within two extremes there is always an aspect of its opposite, that duality is in fact an illusion and the world is made up of a spectrum, not a one or the other dynamic. This is what The High Priestess promises, knowledge of the true nature of all things.

As in the RWS representation she most often sits before a veil, which represents the thin layer of consciousness that seperates us from our inner awareness. It is often thought that we are not allowed behind this veil until we have been initiated, for what we will find will be to unrational for us to understand, but I feel it is there to show us that there truly is little that holds us back from inner awareness. And what is behind the veil, not a dark and mysterious temple, nor symbols of magical power. It is a lake and hills, a body of water representative of our unconscious and the truths hidden within. And it is important to note that this body of water is still and calm, for that is the only way to come to terms with our inner reality, we must become calm, passive and receptive!

This brings us to the fact that The High Priestess is often seen as the ying to The Magician’s yang, where he is representative of the active principle, and she the passive. And more often than not activity is seen as a positive masculine trait and passivity is seen as a negative or weak feminine trait! I want to break this ill-conceived and outdated belief. For without passivity, we would never have the time to sit and think about what we have learnt from our actions. Passivity gives the mind a chance to think and in turn to learn from what we have experienced. And more importantly passivity allows the unconscious to come to the forefront, to emerge from beneath all that constant action and movement that we all too often burden our lives with. For if we are active, we never have to truly think about what it is we are doing, and question the motives behind our actions. I feel that this is a real problem with our society today, we build success upon outer involvement in the world, upon what it is we do, and how ‘important’, we are. And this creates a fear of the unconscious, a fear of our inner truth. And what’s worse is that this has grown to be such a persistent trait within our society that in a way has become unconscious. We need to conciously break this pattern, to in turn come to term with our true inner awareness.

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