The 78 Cards

The High Priestess

Major Arcana, card 2. Astrology: the Moon.

The quiet voice that already knows.

The picture

A woman in a long blue robe sits between two pillars, a black one marked B and a white one marked J. Behind her hangs a veil decorated with pomegranates, and it hides whatever lies beyond. On her head is a crown shaped like a full moon held between two horns, and on her breast is a cross. She holds a partly covered scroll in her lap with the word TORA on it. A crescent moon lies at her feet.

Upright

The Magician acts. The High Priestess waits, and listens.

She sits between the black pillar and the white one, between yes and no, and she does not rush to choose. What she knows she keeps behind the veil and half rolled up in the scroll, because some knowledge only comes when you are quiet enough to hear it. The Moon rules her, and the Moon works on tides and cycles. You cannot hurry her.

When she turns up, the answer you are looking for is inside you already. You may have heard it and talked yourself out of it. This is the card of intuition, dreams, the gut feeling, the thing you noticed and could not explain. Sit still, meditate, sleep on it, and let it come back.

Reversed

Reversed, the High Priestess is usually blocked. The inner voice is still speaking and the noise is drowning it out: too busy, too many opinions from other people, the monkey mind chattering away. She can also be turned inward too far, where everything is kept behind the veil and nothing is ever said out loud, even when it needs to be.

Ask yourself which it is. If you cannot hear yourself think, she is blocked, and the cure is quiet. If you know exactly what you feel and have told nobody, she is asking you to lift the veil a little.

When it turns up

What do you already know that you have been too busy to hear?

The High Priestess has also been a Tarot Card of the Week. Read that post to see the card at work on a real week.

If you would like the cards read against your own chart, my readings are here.

The 78 Cards

Every card in the deck, upright and reversed.

See every page and post in the Contents.

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