Rider Waite card No 2, II The High Priestess
High Priestess
Astrological Correspondence: The Moon
Keywords: receptivity, passivity, potential, knowledge, secrets, something about to arrive.
Description: The mysterious High Priestess jealously guards her secrets and occult wisdom. This card symbolises the unconscious, a concern with our internal worlds, spiritual forces, and the understanding of higher truths through dreams and intuition. As a wise woman the High Priestess is the Goddess of fertility and is seen as a healer, possessing intuitive powers, and clairvoyance, trying to create harmony and inner balance. She emphasises the necessity to get in contact with our inner self, to reflect and meditate, to trust our feelings, and to let dreams and intuition guide us. Observing rather than participating or acting the High Priestess can also represent platonic love, manipulation, a pause in a process that was progressing or even a standstill, causing doubt and confusion.
Upright Associations: Intuition, wisdom and secret knowledge, emotional intelligence. Purity, virtue and patience. Stillness, looking inward, subconscious, Divine Feminine.
Reversed Associations: Emotional instability, emerging passion, delusion, directing outward. Combining intuition and logic. Activity, shallowness, illusion.
Astrological Correspondence: The Moon
Keywords: receptivity, passivity, potential, knowledge, secrets, something about to arrive.
Description: The mysterious High Priestess jealously guards her secrets and occult wisdom. This card symbolises the unconscious, a concern with our internal worlds, spiritual forces, and the understanding of higher truths through dreams and intuition. As a wise woman the High Priestess is the Goddess of fertility and is seen as a healer, possessing intuitive powers, and clairvoyance, trying to create harmony and inner balance. She emphasises the necessity to get in contact with our inner self, to reflect and meditate, to trust our feelings, and to let dreams and intuition guide us. Observing rather than participating or acting the High Priestess can also represent platonic love, manipulation, a pause in a process that was progressing or even a standstill, causing doubt and confusion.
Upright Associations: Intuition, wisdom and secret knowledge, emotional intelligence. Purity, virtue and patience. Stillness, looking inward, subconscious, Divine Feminine.
Reversed Associations: Emotional instability, emerging passion, delusion, directing outward. Combining intuition and logic. Activity, shallowness, illusion.
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Taken from "The Pictorial Key to the Tarot by A.E. Waite (1910)"
She has the lunar crescent at her feet, a horned diadem on her head, with a globe in the middle place, and a large solar cross on her breast. The scroll in her hands is inscribed with the word Tora, signifying the Greater Law, the Secret Law and the second sense of the Word. It is partly covered by her mantle, to shew that some things are implied and some spoken. She is seated between the white and black pillars--J. and B.--of the mystic Temple, and the veil of the Temple is behind her:
it is embroidered with palms and pomegranates. The vestments are flowing and gauzy, and the mantle suggests light--a shimmering radiance. She has been called occult Science on the threshold of the Sanctuary of Isis, but she is really the Secret Church, the House which is of God and man.
She represents also the Second Marriage of the Prince who is no longer of this world; she is the spiritual Bride and Mother, the daughter of the stars and the Higher Garden of Eden. She is, in fine, the Queen of the borrowed light, but this is the light of all. She is the Moon nourished by the milk of the Supernal Mother.
In a manner, she is also the Supernal Mother herself--that is to say, she is the bright reflection. It is in this sense of reflection that her truest and highest name in bolism is Shekinah--the co-habiting glory. According to Kabalism, there is a Shekinah both above and below. In the superior world it is called Binah, the Supernal Understanding which reflects to the emanations that are beneath. In the
lower world it is MaIkuth--that world being, for this purpose, understood as a blessed Kingdom that with which it is made blessed being the Indwelling Glory. Mystically speaking, the Shekinahis the Spiritual Bride of the just man, and when he reads the Law she gives the Divine meaning. There are some respects in which this card is the highest and holiest of the Greater Arcana.
According to the Bible, Boaz (Hebrew: בֹּעַז Bōʿaz) and Jachin (יָכִין Yāḵīn) were two copper, brass or bronze pillars which stood on the porch of Solomon's Temple, the first Temple in Jerusalem.[1] They are sometimes used as symbols in Freemasonry and Tarot. They were probably not support structures, but were free standing, based on similar pillars found in other nearby temples.
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