How The High Priestess and The Empress help us to nurture our inner and outer worlds

When you first start learning to read tarot, you might come across a few cards that – on the surface – seem very similar. It can be hard to differentiate between them early on and in a lot of cases we can become frustrated with our reading progress. That was definitely the case for me when I was learning to tell The High Priestess and The Empress apart. 

When we learn the traditional meanings of the cards, we tend to start with simple keywords. However, some keywords have a lot of crossover, so it’s only when we start to expand our thinking about the cards that we start to see the real differences between them. 

In this blog, I want to walk you through how I now see and work with The High Priestess and The Empress, and how I’ve gotten to grips with both their similarities and their differences. 

In the Foundational Tarot Course, I make sure to cover the ideas around the conscious, subconscious and higher consciousness early in the course for this very reason. Once you understand the different levels within the self that energy can exist, it becomes a little easier to apply context to both the cards individually and within a reading. 

When we refer to an energy existing in the conscious world, we are referring to its tangibility. This means we can see it, hear it, feel it, and experience it physically in our outer world. Things like conscious thought for example are very surface level, they may have roots in the subconscious but they appear formed within the conscious. 

The subconscious is a deeper level of our psyche. It tends to house our belief systems, sense of self, fears etc. Think of the movie Inside Out, it’s the main control centre of who we are and handles all of our automatic behaviours and actions.   

The Empress exists primarily within that conscious world, the outer world, and uses her divine feminine energy to nurture elements of the physical self and our environment. 

The High Priestess exists primarily in the subconscious – the inner world – and nurtures the world within. She is the keeper of our secrets, the guarded parts of ourselves. For example, say you wanted to tackle some limiting beliefs, it’s The High Priestess that stands guard of the gateway you need to pass through in order to access those limiting beliefs. 

The High Priestess and The Empress both exist within all of us, no matter what your gender identity or sexuality. We all have divine feminine energy, it’s what helps us to be compassionate to ourselves and to others, to access intuition and natural born instinct. 

Therefore, the divine feminine energy is made up of both the energy of The High Priestess (Intuition, Spirituality, Subconscious Thoughts and Feelings) and the energy of The Empress (Fertility, Abundance, Material Pleasures, Emotional Connection). In order to nurture both our inner and outer worlds, we need to create a space within ourselves where these energies can easily communicate with each other. 

Just like any partnership, the two individuals need to be given the freedom to act on their strengths and do what they do best. You could say that if you get The High Priestess in a reading, it means that you need to work on allowing her the opportunity to put you in connection with spirit and receive the messages it’s trying to tell you. The other cards in the reading would act to provide more context and help you find ways to open up those channels of communication between The High Priestess and The Empress.  

The main way to get back in touch and feed your High Priestess energy is to connect with your intuition. If your intuitive signals are not firing as they should, then taking time to do some consistent intuition exercises can make a huge difference. You’ll start to notice your confidence and trust in yourself increasing, which in turn, helps you to manifest and take action to nurture and transmit love and compassion out into the outer world (The Empress’ domain). 

Everyone has access to intuition and it only grows stronger the more we interact with it. It’s like a muscle, if you don’t use it or you’re always questioning it, it starts to lose strength and that’s when we can start to feel like it’s disappeared completely. 

As soon as you wake up, take 1-2 minutes to sit still and ask yourself, “What kind of day will today be?” You can pair this with a card pull to give you some guidance, but to start with, it can be helpful to use the thoughts and feelings that pop up naturally. 

Write down your intuitive ideas on a piece of paper. Later that day, check in to see how accurate you were. 

Remember, you won’t be spot on and you’ll definitely have days where you were wrong, but the purpose of this exercise is to get you conversing with your intuition so that you can rebuild the strength and connection. You’ll notice you get closer and closer to your predictions the more you do this. 

“We feed the deep intuitive self by listening to it and acting upon its advice It is a personage in its own right, a magical dollish-sized being which inhabits the psychic land of the interior woman. In this way it is like the muscles in the body. If a muscle is not used, eventually it withers. Intuition is exactly like that: without food, without employment, it atrophies.” – Clarissa Pinkola Esté, Women Who Run With The Wolves

 

Sometimes you can be a highly intuitive being, but forget to give your outer self the same love and attention *cough* me *cough*. Too much time spent making sure the inner world is taken care of might pull you away from ensuring your physical body is strong and healthy, that your relationships are thriving, that your career is being taken care of. 

The key to channeling your Empress energy and nurturing your outer world, is mindfulness. Being fully present with what is happening in the here and now is the number one way to ensure you’re spending enough time in the outer world and balancing it with your inner High Priestess energy. 

Mindfulness can look like a few different things, the most common is self-care such as pamper sessions, making time for passions and hobbies, spending time relaxing and unwinding. Body scan meditations are a great way to really merge the energies of The Empress and The High Priestess because you are not only taking time to nurture the physical body, but you’re also allowing the mind and spirit to relax and connect as one. 

You can try and do your own body scan meditations by simply sitting or lying down, closing your eyes, and slowly -starting from the crown of the head – wash your awareness over each part of your body, working your way down to the tips of your toes. Take a second to notice how each part feels and make a mental note of it. If you feel any tension along the way, take a deep breath and as your breathe out, focus on letting go of that tension.

I’m currently loving the courses and meditations from the app Headspace and I had a look and found this free body scan meditation you can try. Just click the image to head to the full page and also learn about the benefits of body scan meditations.  

In order to feel truly whole, safe and secure in both body, mind and environment, we have to work on balancing our inner and outer worlds. Working with The High Priestess and The Empress in these ways can help us do that.

Whenever you feel like things are spiralling or like you’ve not quite got a grip on life, put some time aside to think about how The High Priestess is showing up, think about how The Empress is manifesting and assess to see if one is more dominant than the other and work to bring them back in alignment.