I remember having an immediate connection to the High Priestess card as I shuffled through my very first tarot deck. She is the first woman we encounter in the Major Arcana. She is mysterious, knowing, and silent. She is a secret-keeper. She has access to that which lies beyond the veil. I felt that, y’know, now that I had the cards, I too could DEFINITELY see beyond the veil.

The High Priestess is a singular person yet she is part of a bigger whole. She is the void where the Empress is fullness in that reprehensible patriarchal styling of women as the virgin/whore dichotomy. Even though I reject that dichotomy as a feminist, I do embrace the crone energy of the High Priestess. She is not about women’s power of procreation, she is about the deep, internal knowing of intuition, something oft attributed to women specifically.

I must note that for so long, the High Priestess and Empress have been written about through the lens of the gender binary. I think it is very important to reject this forced binary and at the same time pay respect to the goddesses that inform their meanings.

In many representations of the High Priestess, she is pictured wearing a crown of the waxing, full, and waning moon. This connects her to Greco-Roman goddesses such as Artemis, goddess of the hunt & moon, and to Hecate, goddess of magic & the night. This also links her back to Isis and Hathor of Egyptian myth. Hathor’s crown resembles that of the High Priestess, though it is said to represent the sun between the horns of a cow.

An awesome deck created by a collective of queer artists in the Southern US, titled Slow Holler, renames the High Priestess to the non-binary “Oracle”. The guidebook reads, “The Oracle opens in to mysterious insight, awareness beyond conscious thought, and deep intuition. They are the voice of mystery, inviting you to approach the unknown, the unexplored, the off-limits, to acknowledge your unconscious and your shadow. To attain insight and wisdom, don’t rely on the obvious or rational. Instead, surrender yourself to fate or seemingly random chance. This openness may reveal hidden meaning within the mundane experience of daily life, offering a glimpse beyond the veil.” (Slow Holler, p. 14)

The veil is one of the symbols that often appears in this card that is rich with symbolism. I feel that even this simple fact, that the card is replete with symbols, indicates the message in the card of meaning being hidden everywhere around us. The High Priestess is like walking through life with a dictionary of symbols and examining any sweet incidence of the mundane as a key that is helping us to cross over into our personal mythologies of meaning. You stop on your walk to the grocery store to admire the cute little acorns on the ground and place one in your pocket. Months later, you wear that jacket again and when you reach your hand into your pocket, you rediscover the symbol of the acorn. What does it mean to you? What does it mean in the rushing river of history?

When we look at the Smith-Waite illustration we see a seated figure wearing pale blue robes, a presumably lunar headpiece/crown atop her head, and an equal armed/solar cross on her chest. She holds a tightly rolled scroll on her lap and at her feet rests a crescent moon. The figure is seated between two pillars, one black and one white, and between the two pillars hangs a veil of fabric emblazoned with palm leaves and pomegranate fruits. Beyond the veil we can glimpse the ocean and the sky.

Rachel Pollack nicely breaks down the plethora of symbols on this card in her book Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom and says of the veil, “Most people assume we are somehow forbidden to pass the pillars of the High Priestess. In reality, we simply do not know how to. To enter beyond the veil would be to know consciously the irrational wisdom of the unconscious. That is the goal of the entire Major Arcana.” (Pollack, p. 39)

In my design of the High Priestess pendant I have removed the figure & the veil. All we see is the pillars on the empty platform and beyond them a single eye in the sky above a still ocean. On the ocean is a reflection of a crescent moon cast by the eye.

The sigil on the reverse of the pendant is very similar to the astrological glyph for White Moon Selena which is a theoretical point in an astrology chart. This is a coincidental resemblance however, as when I channeled the sigil I was simply intuitively combining the crescent moon at the High Priestess’ feet and the equal-armed/solar cross around her neck. These two symbols referencing the cyclical nature of time, phases of the moon, and the wheel of the seasons.

There is so much more lore connected to the High Priestess card: the legend of Pope Joan, the pillars Boaz and Jakim, and the pomegranates and palms all have their stories and correspondences. I recommend Rachel Pollack’s Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, Robert M. Place’s The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, and Hajo Banzhaf’s Tarot and the Journey of the Hero for more tarot starting points if you are excited to delve in!