The High Priestess

I think I could write about this card for hours. There's just so much here. All of the Major Arcana are like that, to one degree or another, but this one in particular feels like it just demands a deep dive. Let's take it one step at a time. First, the name:

Like the Hierophant, this card was renamed in reference to the ancient Greek Eleusinian Mysteries. While the ancient Greek Hierophant was tasked with guiding initiates and helping them understand – that is, showing them what was holy – the High Priestess would assume the role of a goddess in a retelling of the story of Demeter, Persephone, and Hades. We'll talk more about that later. But unlike the Hierophant, the original name of this card is less straightforward.

Prior to the 20th Century, most decks referred to this card as "The Papess" -- that is, "The Female Pope." That's a little odd, because the Pope is always a man. The word "Pope" comes from the Greek word for "father." The term "Papess" was invented to translate the card's name into English.

Why is this card named after a position which notably does not exist? I've heard two common theories.

First, many people believe the original card was intended as a reference to Pope Joan. Now generally agreed to be a fictional character, Pope Joan was supposedly a woman who disguised herself as a man, joined the clergy, and rose through the ranks, undiscovered, until she became Pope. This story is generally agreed to be fictional now, but that was controversial for quite some time. At the time the first Tarot decks were being constructed, in the places we know they were common, the story would likely have been well known, and potentially a subject of debate. Pope Joan seems to have been a very popular legend, a sort of trickster figure in folk Catholicism. It's not a huge stretch to imagine that she may be the origin of the card.

The second explanation is less common, but has quite a few ardent supporters. Some people link The Papess to Wilhelmina of Bohemia, a 13th century Italian noblewoman who established her own short-lived sect of Christianity with herself at its head. The Wikipedia article on Wilhelmina actually makes the claim that she's the basis for the card, though I think it's far from settled. The general belief is that, even though the first Tarot decks were created centuries after her death, they were commissioned by her descendants, and it's possible that they included the card as a tribute to her.

I disagree with this largely because of the actual intended purpose of Tarot decks at the time. These didn't begin as tools for occult introspection -- they were playing cards. The Major Arcana were originally a trump suit, and higher numbers were better. You can see this in the way the cards are ordered -- A fool gets beaten by a juggler, who gets beaten by the emperor, who gets beaten by the Pope, et cetera. It seems very unlikely to me that a card meant to honor your ancestor would be placed so low in the deck.

I'm also not really sold that "Papess" is the term that would have been chosen for her, if she was meant to be the figure on the card. Wilhelmina did not – at least in my reading – cast herself as a female equivalent to the Pope. She saw herself as an earthly incarnation of the Holy Spirit.

As a result, I tend to buy the Pope Joan explanation. I think it also ties in well with the key ideas of this card – the unconscious, things hidden, intuition, and secret knowledge. In short, I associate this card with the esoteric, in contrast to The Hierophant's focus on the exoteric.

With the name settled, let's talk a bit about the imagery on this card. There are a few elements that stand out.

The columns on either side of the card are distinctive, both for the alternating colors – one light and one dark – and for the fairly unfortunate letters on them. The letters stand for Boaz and Jachin. These are the columns that stood outside Solomon's Temple according to the Hebrew Bible. As written in Jeremiah and Kings, both columns were made of metal of some kind, probably bronze or brass. They were identical.

But here, the columns are depicted as opposites, one light and one dark. This is probably due to the significance later occultists would place on the description of the Temple of Solomon. The original text is dry and specific, a series of measurements in cubits and explanations of building materials and decorations. To some, however, this description carries immense esoteric significance.

You can read a more in-depth explanation of the columns here, but in short, they've been cast as representatives of opposing forces. One passes between these two opposites to enter the Temple -- not so much a literal temple, but a temple as metaphor for a mystic space. Beyond these columns is initiation into the great mysteries, and we see The High Priestess seated at the border between our world and that one.

Connections to Jewish Mysticism and the Torah are woven throughout the Tarot. Usually when someone refers to something as "Judeo-Christian," they mean "Christian, and I guess by extension Jewish." The Tarot is one of few things I think the term can be fairly applied to. It genuinely does pull heavily from both Jewish and Christian mysticism. This card has one other very obvious connection to Judaism: the presence of the Torah.

You can see it on the High Priestess's lap, partially covered by her robes. This obscures the final letter in "Torah," which means that "Tarot" and "Tora" contain the same letters, and are in some sense equated. The same motif shows up elsewhere, in The Wheel of Fortune.

In A Pictorial Key to the Tarot, the frustratingly obtuse book Arthur Edward Waite wrote about the deck he and Pamela Coleman Smith designed, he explains that "[t]he 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 (sic) that some things are implied and some spoken."

In other words, this isn't necessarily the literal actual Torah, just as The Hierophant isn't the literal actual Pope. Instead, we're meant to understand that this is the same kind of thing that the Torah is, and that the Torah is, as Waite sees it, the same kind of thing that the Tarot is. Beyond that, we're meant to pay special attention to what isn't explicitly stated. That is, the esoteric.

In this sense, and in many others, I see The High Priestess as a counterpart to The Hierophant, an inverse of that card and its meaning. I should note that this is actually a bit controversial. In my experience, most readers and most books tend to link The High Priestess primarily with The Magician. Honestly, I think this is a product of studying the deck "in order." I don't see many reasons to link them besides their assigned numbers. The connections to The Hierophant are much more clear.

As I've already said, the names are an obvious connection – The High Priestess and The Hierophant were counterparts in the Eleusinian Mysteries, closely linked but with very different jobs. The original names, Pope and Papess, make that even more clear.

The imagery on each card evokes the other. Both figures are seated on a throne between two columns dressed in ornate, ceremonial clothing. Both directly face the viewer.

This similarity invites us to focus on the contrast. The Hierophant is dressed in warm colors, reds and yellows, and holds up his hand, gesturing to his audience. He has an audience -- two people are depicted listening to him. Behind him, there's a wall. He's indoors.

The High Priestess is outside. Behind her, a tapestry hands between her and a large body of water. She is alone, dressed in pale, cool colors. Lots of dichotomies are wrapped up in this. Male and female, light and dark, day and night, warm and cold. Inner and outer life. The contrast between these two cards will be relevant throughout the Tarot. They start to establish a symbolic language that we can refer to when reading any other card.

Okay, two more symbols on The High Priestess that I'd like to discuss: the water and the pomegranates.

The water behind The High Priestess is a major theme in the Tarot, one of those recurring symbols that mean basically the same thing on every card. Water generally stands in for emotion or the unconscious. On this card, the position of the columns and the veil indicate that this water is the sacred temple which The High Priestess presides over. We'll talk more about the water in the next essay, on the Two of Swords.

The final symbol, and the one I find most interesting on this card, is the design of the veil or tapestry that hangs between the two columns – the pomegranates. In a wild bit of chance overlap, this works as a reference to two completely separate religious traditions. As mentioned many times, the names "High Priestess" and "Hierophant" are taken from ancient Greek Eleusinian Mysteries. The High Priestess in this context would take on the role of Persephone and/or Demeter in a re-enactment of the Hades abduction myth, which notably involves Persephone eating several pomegranate seeds and thus being forced to stay in the underworld for part of every year.

In the Hebrew Bible, the tops of the columns of Boaz and Jachin are decorated with designs that include pomegranates.

To me, the pomegranates are the crux of this card – they link its two key sources of imagery, and as a result we're prompted to consider them in two or three contexts at once.

Based on their presence outside the Temple of Solomon, we understand that pomegranates indicate the entrance to a metaphoric sacred temple, an abstract representation of the mystic and esoteric.

From the Eleusinian Mysteries, we understand that pomegranates represent the role The High Priestess plays – that is, the way she assumes the role of and experiences the story of a goddess. Understanding through experience, rather than instruction or study.

Lastly, from the story of Hades and Persephone, we understand that pomegranates represent the trauma of that story -- the abduction of Persephone and her being forced into the underworld.

I think the first two can be parsed pretty easily -- the temple of The High Priestess can't be explained to you. You need to experience it. This is a kind of knowledge that can only come from experience, as the ancient High Priestess personally experiences the story of Persephone, Hades, and Demeter.

But I don't think that the third meaning is here by accident. The veil being covered in an archetypal symbol of a deeply traumatic event is super fascinating to me. Don't get me wrong, I don't think you need to experience horrible things to be able to experience the esoteric or the mystic – I don't even think it helps. But I do think this says something interesting about the widely-accepted link between femininity and the esoteric. That is, that your gender doesn't push you toward the esoteric or exoteric so much as your place in society at large does.

This is a deeply complex topic, but I'll give one example to make the general point. When we look at medieval Catholicism, the women we know best are all mystics: Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Genoa, Margery Kempe, et cetera. Is that because women are inherently predisposed to mystic experiences? Probably not. I think marginalized people are frequently drawn to – or rather, pushed into – the esoteric because exoteric authority is denied to them. The only way a woman could write with authority in the medieval church was to embrace mysticism, so – surprise – many people did that.

Pomegranates are associated with femininity elsewhere in the Tarot, on The Empress, and we'll talk about them more then.

Lastly, we've talked a lot about opposites while looking at this card – light and dark, masculine and feminine, Boaz and Jachin, The Hierophant and The High Priestess. I mentioned earlier the need to pass between the opposites of Boaz and Jachin to enter the temple of The High Priestess, and that idea of synthesizing extremes is central in the Tarot. I urge you to read this not as an advocation of a "middle path," or a space between masculine and feminine. Instead, read this as a true synthesis. Entirely light and entirely dark. Entirely masculine and entirely feminine. All of The Hierophant and all of The High Priestess.

This is my longest essay so far and it feels like we've just barely begun to talk about this card – maybe we'll revisit it sometime. For now, we'll move on to a card that has a lot in common with this one: The Two of Swords.