Reading Tarot Like The High Priestess
My first exposure to the High Priestess in the movie The Mists of Avalon, a retelling of the myth of Arthur from the perspective of the women in the story. The character who most embodies the High Priestess in the first part of the film is the high priestess Vivian. She is powerful, mysterious, and magical. Like the Magician, the High Priestess is a master of all the elements, but, while the Magician’s magic comes from tools, Viviane and her priestesses use none. If they want to light a pile of sticks on fire, they uses their mind. If they want to lower the mists, their only tools are their hands. The source of the Magician’s power is external. Even if the Magician works with metaphors, the metaphors he uses are ones that have meaning in the outside world. Viviane and her priestesses find the source of their power internally. When a young priestess fails to light a pile of sticks on fire because she is distracted by visions of her brother, Viviane doesn’t tell her to get better at using her wand. She tells her to concentrate, to control her mind.
The power of the mind and intuition, this is the power of the High Priestess.
The High Priestess’s Magic is Intuition
How do you talk about intuition? It’s so different for everyone. Some people have a very physical experience of intuition. When they’re about to do something wrong, they literally feel it in their gut. Other people see colors or hear a skeptical grumbling noise from a guide. Some people just know things and have learned to trust that, even if they can’t give a reason. Some people are particularly adept at noticing signs and omens. Some people need tools to help them hear their intuition. They practice automatic writing or morning pages every morning, or they start their day with a Tarot reading, or are very particular about knowing what all of the astrological transits are and how they effect them.
All of these diverse ways of hearing from inner wisdom is beautiful, if you know what your style of intuition is, but it can be a nightmare for someone who is just starting to figure out how to work with intuition. You need intuition in order to know what your style of intuition is, and with so many options, it can be really difficult to figure out where and how to listen.
The dictionary is no help with this whatsoever. The word “intuition” comes from the Latin word intuit which means “contemplate,” which is a compound word of “to look” and “upon.” So, intuition is the thing you look at, but what are you looking at, exactly? Definitionally, intuition is like an onion. You try to get to the center of it and find nothing but air. The dictionary isn’t wrong. The messages of intuition may (or may not) be dramatic for the person experiencing them, but intuition is private, subjective. There is really nothing for anyone else to see.
Intuition relies on what the political theorist Hannah Arendt called “a silent dialogue between me and myself.” It is in this idea that we begin to get some insight into what intuition really is. It is a way of communicating with yourself. Arendt called this silent dialog “thinking,” but intuition is more than thinking. Thinking is communicating with your rational self. Intuition communicates with parts of yourself that have nothing to do with rationality at all, the sides of yourself that are a little closer to the animals and a little closer to the gods.
The first type of intuition, the animal side, is often called your “gut.” I call it the “animal side” because it’s the kind of intuition animals have. It’s the part of you that has an animal sense of people and places. It’s highly attuned to danger and safety, friend and foe. It’s the part of you that will not shut up about avoiding that stupid stairwell at work, even though you never run into anyone there, and taking it shaves five minutes off your walk to your bus. It’s the part of you that looks at someone you’ve never met and says, “That person is bad news.” Or it’s the part of you that’s kind of like a golden retriever, who meets someone for the first time and desperately, happily wants that person to be your friend.
The second type of intuition, the divine side, is what people usually mean when they say intuition. It’s a little bit ethereal and mysterious. It’s the part of you that knows this pendulum is for you and not that one. It’s the part of you that knows your friend really needs a hug, even though they haven’t said anything and everything about their body language says they’re fine. It’s not rational. There is no rational reason why the pendulum with the quartz stone and the moon handle is better for you than the amethyst stone with a quartz handle, but something in you knows, even before you try the pendulum, that one is for you, and the other one is not.
The more mystical expression of intuition has historically been associated with women. Some, even today, call this type of intuition “women’s intuition” and deny that people who aren’t women have access to this type of knowing at all. This is wrong. Intuition has nothing to do with estrogen or gender signaling. Everyone, regardless of their gender has intuition, but if you don’t identify as a woman, you may have a difficult time finding people in the media who use intuition to make decisions and look like you. Until this problem is fixed, sitting with the lack of representation can be, itself, a way of working with the high priestess.
The Dark Goddess
One of the High Priestess’s symbols is the moon. This marks her as a priestess of the Dark Goddesses. Dark Goddesses like Ceridwen, Hekate, and the Morrigan are comfortable with the darker side of human nature. Hekate is the goddess of witches who aren’t necessarily nice. Ceridwen is famous for her anger, and the Morrigan chooses those who are to be slain on the battlefield and eventually merged in the lore with the ban sidhe, the fairy monster who wails for the dead.
Why does the High Priestess come now in the Fool’s Journey? Why do we jump from the optimism of the Magician to a priestess of the goddesses of anger and death?
To answer that question, I’ll add another chapter to the story about Silicon Valley from “Reading Tarot Like The Magician.” In the beginning of the life of a technology startup, things look shiny and wonderful. You’re the Magician. You have this wonderful idea, and you know that no one else in the world has ever thought of anything like it. You feel like a genius. All you need to do is raise your hand on the right street in Palo Alto, and you know that all of the bankers are going to come running with their checkbooks begging you for the privilege of giving you cash.
You start to do the work. It goes well. You start to actually manifest some things in the world.
Then disaster strikes. You find out about a rival who came up with your idea six months earlier than you did. You make some appointments with bankers, and you feel like you’re speaking a foreign language when you talk to them, and they can’t understand what is so genius about your work. You learn that your idea isn’t actually that easy to implement. It’s hard work, and you’ve already quit your job, and you don’t own anything but your laptop and a box of frozen burritos. Your apartment is a tiny corner of somebody’s garage the size of a cubicle that you share with fifteen other startups.
You reach a dark night of the soul, and you come face to face with what kind of person you are when you’re miserable and under pressure. Ideally, you acknowledge your negative emotions. You figure out how you’re going to deal with being so angry, depressed, and jealous without causing anyone harm. At the very least, if you are going to keep going, you have to turn inward and face yourself. You need to connect with the part of yourself that wants to continue doing something difficult when so many things in the outer world—including rationality itself—seem to be against you. The part of us that stands between us and the darkness, between our rationality and the things we know that transcend rationality, this is the High Priestess.
Many people first encounter the High Priestess archetype during dark times in their lives. Until they go through those times, their lives simply don’t give them a reason to turn inward, and they have no reason to do the kind of intense contemplation that making friends with this archetype—and developing intuition—requires. If they come out of it, they will be more powerful and more intuitive and in more control of themselves than they’ve ever been, but like the High Priestess, they must do this work without tools.All they have are their will and their hands and their eyes and their gut.
With one exception.
The High Priestess’s Book
The High Priestess’s only tool is a book. Why this exception? The reason for this comes back to the dictionary definition of intuition, which is so deeply connected with “contemplation.”
Contemplation in most usages is just another word for thinking, but it also has a deeper meaning. In Druidry and some branches of Christianity, contemplation is a meditative act that is often assisted by reading sacred texts. This practice is sometimes called lectio divina, which translates as “divine reading.”
Divine reading is another gateway to developing intuition, one that is not quite as soul-tearing as the dark night of the soul. Engaging in that “silent dialog between me and myself” is difficult when you’re first starting out, and it can help to start by having a silent dialog between yourself and a book.
In divine reading, you turn your attention to a passage from a sacred text or poem, and after you’ve read it once, you go back and turn your attention to word or phrase or sentence that draws your attention. You don’t try to justify your decision rationally. You just go with the thing that stands out to you. And you think about the passage for a long time. If you think about it long enough, you find that you are, eventually, no longer dialoging with the book at all but dialoging with yourself. If you allow the dialog to go on long enough, you usually discover the reason why you chose that passage in the first place. Even if the reason for your choice remains mysterious, the decision to honor your intuition enough to act on it be an essential first step in learning to hear and work with your intuition.
The High Priestess in Divination
Like the Magician, the High Priestess is a beginner. She stands at the door of intuition. She accesses the waters of intuition behind her—and their attendant goddess—remotely, through the moon on her head and the book in her hands. Some come to her and ask her mediate between them and the Dark Goddess, but she knows there is only so much help they can get from the outside, and so she directs them back to their own wisdom.
As diviners, it is essential that we have a working relationship with intuition. Intuition tells us which cards to read or stones to throw. It guides us to the most important areas of a birth chart to focus on, and it tells us that this interpretation of a card is right and not that one, but there are times when intuition itself is the answer. There are times when a reading refuses to give answers and redirects our clients—or ourselves—to that deep inner knowing.
“Know yourself,” the High Priestess says. “Trust yourself.“
When you work with the High Priestess while doing divination, you are fundamentally alone. When you are learning her lessons, circumstances will conspire to make sure that you have a lot of alone time, or you may find yourself withdrawing into the darkness to commune with yourself. Don’t fight it. Darkness and quiet and solitude are necessary to begin to hear your own voice, and it is only after you have explored the dark corners of your soul that you can begin to hear the sides of yourself that rule your intuition and speak without words.
This post was originally published on Aquarius Moon Journal on 21 February 2020.
