The High Priestess

In the Rider-Waite-Smith deck (1909), the High Priestess sits between two pillars marked B and J — Boaz and Jachin, the twin pillars of Solomon's Temple. She holds a partially visible Torah scroll labeled TORA, a veil of pomegranates hangs behind her, and a crescent moon rests at her feet. None of these details are decorative. The pillars signal duality without resolution. The veil marks the boundary between what's known and what isn't. The scroll she doesn't fully show you is the point — she holds knowledge she's not giving away yet. Upright, this card shows up when something important is operating below the surface: a situation that needs sitting with, not acting on. Reversed, she often points to ignored instincts, information being withheld, or a refusal to look at what you already know. She's not The Hermit — she's not withdrawn from the world. She's present, watching, and not talking.

The card's earliest ancestor appears in the Visconti-Sforza tarot deck, painted in Milan around 1450, where the figure was called La Papessa — the Female Pope. The image likely referenced either the legendary Pope Joan or Manfreda Visconti, a 13th-century Guglielmite abbess her followers believed would become pope. In the Tarot de Marseille (17th–18th century French tradition), the card kept the Papesse label. Antoine Court de Gébelin's 1781 work Le Monde Primitif reframed the tarot as an Egyptian mystery system, giving cards like this one an esoteric reading they hadn't carried before. Eliphas Lévi connected her to Kabbalah in his 1854 Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie. A.E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith overhauled the imagery entirely for the 1909 RWS deck, replacing the papal figure with a High Priestess drawn from Hermetic and Kabbalistic symbolism. Crowley's Thoth deck (painted by Lady Frieda Harris, published 1944) calls her the Priestess and places her on the Kabbalistic path connecting Kether to Tiphareth.

Rachel Pollack's Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (1980) has one of the most grounded readings of this card — her breakdown of the B and J pillars alone is worth the chapter. Mary K. Greer's Tarot for Yourself (1984) gives you structured journaling prompts you can apply card by card, including the High Priestess. For a starting exercise: pull this card alone, set it in front of you, and write down what you notice without looking anything up first. Then compare your observations to a reference. Biddy Tarot's site covers upright and reversed meanings in plain language, and Labyrinthos Academy has a free illustrated guide that's useful for beginners building visual literacy with RWS symbolism.