The High Priestess is card #2 in the Major Arcana. Each card builds on the previous one, lily-padding in a way. The Magician invites you to open to the magick within and around you, creating conscious connections.
Once that has been achieved, the High Priestess asks you to deepen and listen. Once you open to the magick that permeates all things, you can heed those magickal messages. You can sit in the liminal, letting the magick deepen.
The High Priestess as the second card in the Majors (also in the Creation line), symbolizes the joining of you and the magick, and forges the connection between you and your intuitive knowing.
In this blog post, I will help you better understand this card by giving you the main themes I use in readings, and I will explore the depth of symbolism from the decks that I have, so you can see, compare, and connect with the images.
The High Priestess builds on the Magician by taking that awareness of magick, and using it as a root system from selfhood. She is the one that teaches you how to more deeply receive the magick that abounds in your life, and tuning in like a radio to it’s often subtle frequencies.
Listening to Intuition with the High Priestess
The first way that I read the High Priestess is that she invites to listen and receive. When you are listening to the internal and liminal voice of intuition, you are opening yourself to receive answers, understandings, and depth that is often pushed aside in waking reality. Have you ever felt something, known something, or perceived something that you didn’t have direct proof for, or evidence to back up? That is your gut, your intuitive voice speaking to you.
Sometimes this comes forward in the forms of safety, placing you on heightened alert. Sometimes this comes in the form of something random, a weird or obscure signpost that drops in front of you, and you have no idea what to do with it. Again, this is the intuitive voice, and everyone has this inner, liminal voice.
Intuition is like a muscle, always there but it works best when you actively work with it, become attuned to what working with it feels like. To use an example, when covid hit and I didn’t have access to the yoga studio, I decided to start working out at home with Youtube videos. I was doing an ab workout, and the woman on Youtube said to target those muscles with my mind. To focus on those areas, and not just go through the motions of the crunches. When I did that….I was like woah, that’s what my abs feel like in crunch. They hurt.
Now, I digress into something trivial, but I use this reference because it is the same with your intuition. When you focus yourself towards it, it activates the feeling more deeply. It won’t feel like a crunch or sit-up, but you will feel something, even if it is for once second. The High Priestess says that focusing yourself, your intentions, and your awareness to your liminal inner self activates the connection. It will always wax and wane like the Moon, but, over time it will become easier to receive your intuitive knowing.
Switching now to the symbolism in the cards above, there are two things I want to highlight. The first is the two pillars, or trees. These represent the spirit and the material, the yin and yang, the life and death. In the spectrum of all these things, she is in the in-between. Another thing we see often, and here in these cards, is some kind of scroll. These hold the esoteric, divine, and magickal teachings. Like mentioned before, when you start to listen and receive from intuition, and follow that through to conclusion, both in standard teachings and in energy, you learn the deeper lessons of spirit, the cosmos, or the Divine.
Once you start to connect more to your intuition, you can have a better view, or call and response with it, using it to align more with the rest of your life. You use it to direct you from a more rooted place. You are more attuned to the radio of magick that exists around you, creating a more mindful understanding of what is at play in the internal and external spaces.
The next way that I read the High Priestess is: incubating, shepherding or moving energies between the internal and the external, the self and the Divine. The High Priestess can show up in the form of activity, or in physical actions, like doing something that may seem out of place, but in the depths of yourself it makes sense.
Sometimes it is not in action, but in energy. It is sitting with the messages from intuition and magick, and just letting them incubate and grow. Again, we are in the Creation line of the Majors, so much of the time and work of the High Priestess may be just letting things grow and become. You can pair this with actions of reflection. You can use your own cards. You can be in nature. You can meditate. You could even listen to your favorite song, but sometimes you cannot force the intuitive voice to come forward; it has to happen organically.
To put it in another context for understanding, one of the ways that I teach reading the tarot is that when you pull a card over, try to not feel like you have to have an immediate understanding or answer from your card. There are times where you and your card(s) need to marinate to develop the connection. You may write down what you see, and then you go about your day, and at some random time, that symbol pops up and your like “I saw that earlier!” Forcing an answer wouldn’t have allowed that marination to develop an organic connection.
The final invitation with the High Priestess comes in this message: when you start to listen, receive, and answer the voice of Divine intuition, you are freeing yourself. You in an uninhibited space, untouched by anyone. You are truly in your wild reclamation. The High Priestess comes to you in the part that no one can touch, and no one can take from you.
Just look at how this has been weaponized and used to demean, belittle, hurt, wound, and even torture people. Those in power need your reliance and belief in everything they say and do. If we look to many historical references, those who were on the fringe, who didn’t fall in line, and those who developed understandings from creating connections to that magick (from the Magician) were seen as different, and even dangerous. Your intuition is something that no one can take from you, and that scares the shit out of those in power, those with something to lose.
Even if we don’t go to such extreme measures, we can still see this in action. When someone is in touch with the magick, their intuition, and the liminal spaces, they are different. They are not as easily swept up, unsettled, or swayed. Those who connect to this beautiful energy of the High Priestess are in their autonomy, and it is glorious to be around people like that because you feel it. It may even shift your own energy. Imagine if we all connected to each other by first connecting to our own intuition. What a beautiful world that would be.
Symbolism of the High Priestess
From the Ostara tarot (one of my favorite depictions) we see a regal woman who is also part insect. Her feelers let her sense the world around her, picking up touch and smell- the building blocks of creating the bigger picture. She holds a pomegranate in her hands. Pomegranates symbolize the cycle of life, death, and rebirth, most notably with the myth of the goddess Persephone who was taken to the Underworld, and ate six pomegranate seeds, sealing her fate of spending six months in the Underworld, initiating the coming of Winter.
The symbol of cycles is not only found in the pomegranate but also in the Moon, which we see frequently, and is the ruling planet over this card. In the Herbcrafter’s Tarot, we see a pouch of Mugwort, and moons and stars decorate the fabric. Mugwort’s Latin name is associated with the goddess Artemis. As a hunter goddess, she was the autonomous power unto herself, along with the Moon. She nursed and nourished the wilderness, understanding not only her power, but how it coincided with the powers of nature. For a detailed dive in the herb, click here to read this beautiful article.
The main thing we see here with these two cards is the connection to winged creatures. The bat symbolizes the same connection of understanding the world, like the insect above, but through echolocation, using high frequencies in sound pulses. The owl in the Shadowscapes tarot symbolizes keen eyesight and wisdom. We also see through the imagery of this card a connection to sacred geometry, which is a building block of spiritual connection. From the smallest atom to our galaxies, sacred geometry speaks to the fundamental design of the cosmos, unifying all things, which is so aligned to the High Priestess. She teaches that our intuitive and liminal understanding unifies us to the very threads of life.
The last two cards I want to share with you are these. The High Priestess in the Wild Unknown tarot deck is a white tiger. I have written about this before, but white tigers are not really found in nature, or they shouldn’t be at least because the gene from the orange we know of a tiger to white is passed through recessive genes, which usually occurs through in-breeding. However, what this speaks to is something that is both in nature and not in nature. The orange is used to camouflage, so the white tiger here represents pure presence and acceptance of self.
The second image, and I know this is really hard to see (I apologize, my camera would not pick it up), has a quote I want to reference around the band of the woman’s arm. The quote reads:
I may be kindly, I am ordinarily gentle, but in my line of business I am obliged to will terribly what I will at all.
This is from Catherine the Great, and I think this quote is perfect. It means that while her disposition may be kind and gentle, her need to rule Russia requires her to make decisions in alignment with the brutal realities of the real world. Her need to govern and decide for the country requires her to make choices that are hard to bear. This, again, is the High Priestess.
The High Priestess is not an easy card- a beautiful one, but not easy. Tapping into autonomous intuition requires a conviction to face the storm The High Priestess will take you to uncomfortable, dark, and wounded places where you will need to acknowledge the brutality, sit with it, even use it. Moving through cycles of darkness and death are not for the light-hearted, and she won’t accept anything less. To sit and incubate in darkness will feel maddening, cold, distant, and disturbing at times. That, my dear, is how you come back to the light. Just like the Moon, you must go into darkness, into fallow spaces, and let those energies teach you what you need to know.
I hope you have enjoyed this deep dive into the High Priestess. She has so much to give in a reading, and to your intuitive strengthening. May her teachings of receiving, cycles, and freedom remind you that your power and answers often lie within you, fostered by the connections you cultivate in the external world, in others, and in the Divine. And so it is…
Ashlie McDiarmid
Hello there! I hope you liked this blog post. As a tarot and oracle reader, my goal with my blogs is to offer you content, resources, and access to the tools that have transformed my life.
I believe that your own intuition is the deepest form of knowing, but here in my little corner of the internet, I share insights based in intuition and instinct. I share my love for nature, witchcraft, and the wild spirit.
- If your spirit is at home in wild places
- If you feel the need to claim your autonomy as ritual
- If you want to more deeply trust your own intuition
- If you want resources or connections to tarot, oracle, witchcraft, and wild sovereignty, then welcome!
