The High Priestess: Tarot Meaning, Reversed and Moon

What is in the picture

Pamela Colman Smith drew The High Priestess as a seated figure between a black pillar and a white one, a veil of pomegranates behind her, a crescent at her feet and a half-hidden scroll in her lap. Start there rather than with a keyword list. The scene is the reading, and it is the reason this deck took over from every deck that showed the Majors as plain allegorical figures.

The High Priestess upright

Something is known and not yet said, and there is usually a good case for not saying it yet. This is the card of information that is not ready to be handled.

The question it actually puts to you: what you already know and are talking yourself out of. That is the useful part. A card that only tells you what is happening is a horoscope; a card that asks you something is doing the job.

The High Priestess reversed

Secrets that have gone stale and started to cost something, or an instinct overruled by an argument.

That is one reading of it, and readers do not agree on how reversals work. There are four common methods, they give different answers, and nobody who tells you theirs is the correct one is describing the tradition honestly.

Plenty of readers shuffle so that reversals never occur, and read the surrounding cards for the same information instead. That is a legitimate method, not a shortcut.

The astrology on this card

Every Major Arcana card has a planetary, zodiacal or elemental attribution in the Golden Dawn system, and The High Priestess takes Moon. The card carries the planet's job rather than a sign's temperament, which is why it shows up as a function in a reading: knowing, secrecy, waiting.

What The High Priestess is often confused with

The Hermit. Both withdraw from the room. She is withholding something; he is looking for something.

Where these meanings come from

Worth knowing, because most pages present card meanings as though they were handed down from antiquity. Playing cards reached Europe in the fourteenth century and the earliest surviving tarot decks were painted in northern Italy in the fifteenth, as a card game. For roughly three hundred years that is all they were. Divination with them is first clearly documented in the late eighteenth century, in France.

The meanings in use today in English are almost entirely the Rider deck's. It was published in London in 1909: Arthur Edward Waite wrote the scheme, Pamela Colman Smith drew all seventy-eight cards, and she was paid a flat fee and went uncredited on the box for most of a century. Her decision to give every pip card a scene rather than a plain arrangement of symbols is the single reason modern tarot works the way it does, because a picture can be read by somebody who has memorised nothing.

Both of them were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which is where the astrological attributions on this page come from. Those are a genuine system with internal logic, and they are a little over a century old rather than ancient. Saying so costs nothing and it is the difference between a page you can trust on the rest of the detail and a page you cannot.

Using The High Priestess in an actual reading

1. Read the position before the card. The same card in a "what is blocking this" position and a "what helps" position is not making the same statement.
2. Describe the picture out loud before reaching for a meaning. Pamela Colman Smith put the information in the image. What the figures are doing is usually the reading.
3. Check the suits around it. This card among four Swords is a different message from the same card among four Cups.
4. Ask what the card asks rather than what it predicts. Tarot is far better at describing a situation you are already in than at naming a date.

If you want something built from your own chart

A card describes a situation. It does not know anything about you specifically, because the deck is the same deck for everybody who picks it up. A birth chart is the opposite: it is built from your date, time and place of birth and it describes one person. Here is how to find your birth time if you do not have it.