MAJOR ARCANA
The High Priestess Tarot Meanings
The High Priestess follows The Fool and Magician major arcana cards and encourages you to trust in your intuition, and higher power and be more aware of your subconscious mind.
The High Priestess Tarot card acts as the divine feminine of the spiritual world, with her counterpart The Hierophant acting as the divine masculine. Together they provide the light and shadow of the spiritual self.
The High Priestess Tarot meanings ask you to embrace your feminine energy. Whether you are male/female or non-gendered, the words ‘feminine energy’ often refer to being more open, vulnerable, emotional and in touch with your inner voice. The High Priestess Tarot meanings can be tricky to grasp, because just like the priestess, they are like smoke, hard to grab hold of and process consciously.
The High Priestess Tarot Meanings - Upright
When you draw The High Priestess in the upright position, it is time to delve inwards and really pay attention to the hidden thoughts and emotions that you may not be aware of, but are manifesting in more physical or unusual emotional symptoms. Some of the main properties of The High Priestess upright are:
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Female intuition
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Inner voice
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The subconscious mind
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The balance between the physical and the mental
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Science and education
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Spiritual wisdom
In the upright position, The High Priestess is often a sign that you are either in need of or currently exploring your subconscious mind. In the Mystic Mondays deck, we see The High Priestess is halfway between the physical and spiritual world, she is balancing two objects representing the physical and the spiritual.
When faced with The High Priestess, think about what might be blossoming deep within, what fears, thoughts, ideas or anxieties might be rearing their head.
The High Priestess Tarot Meanings - Reversed
When The High Priestess is in the reversed position, it most commonly comes as a sign that there is an underlying emotional or mental blockage that needs attending to. When it is referring to you personally, it is showing you that you need to delve deeper and maybe face things you’ve been avoiding.
If the card is referring to someone else, it can show that the person may have a hidden agenda and you should tap into your intuition when around them. Other properties of the reverse High Priestess are:
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Secrets
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Doubts
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Emotional imbalance
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Incorrect judgement
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Psychic blockage
The reversed High Priestess is all about uncovering the negative or hard to face. We often push away difficult feelings or thoughts, but the best thing we can do is face them head-on and work through them. This ensures that you overcome them and stops them from growing into something harder to manage.
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Reading The High Priestess in a Tarot Spread
The High Priestess is one of those cards that’s really hard to get a good handle on. This is probably because she represents something in our lives that is so hard to put into words and is not a tangible thing we can grab hold of and analyse. The High Priestess represents our intuitive selves, the gut feelings we get and the knowledge that requires no conscious learning.
There is a great deal of trust that needs to be handed over to The High Priestess and that’s not always an easy thing to wrap our heads around. Let’s have a look at a couple of ways we could view this card when it pops up in our readings, to see if we can make a bit more sense of it.
Quick tip: Some people see The High Priestess as a card that represents the goddess Hecate. Sometimes researching into these correlations can make the meanings easier to grasp when reading the cards.
The High Priestess as An Invitation
The invitations that The High Priestess puts out there are some of the most profound and also the hardest invitations to accept. She asks you to delve into parts of yourself that may seem a little scary at first, but the reason she asks you to do these things is that she knows that you’ll be so much better off once you’ve faced these things head-on.
For The High Priestess, this invitation could be the following:
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An invitation to trust your intuition and allow it to guide you
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An invitation to allow yourself flexibility and the ability to just sit in the moment
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An invitation to work on spiritual growth
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An invitation to learn more about your own inner world and how it affects you physically
The High Priestess as Sage Advice
I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve brushed off or avoided the advice of The High Priestess. Working on inner development is so much more draining than taking care of our exterior world, so often we just ignore it and hope we can keep pushing the bad stuff down further and further. The High Priestess appears when we need to stop side-stepping these things and face them head-on. She asks us to trust ourselves and allow things to bubble to the surface so we can take care of ourselves from the inside out.
Some advice The High Priestess may offer is:
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Your intuition is your greatest asset in these times
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Allow the connection between spirit, body and mind to flourish and allow whatever feelings come up to play out without interference
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Allow your inner voice space to be heard and take it into consideration like you would the advice or suggestions of a friend or loved one
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Always follow your intuition, even if it’s just to see where it will lead you
The High Priestess as a Lesson
A lot of the lessons The High Priestess offers are internal lessons. They are lessons we need to learn about ourselves and our own subconscious. High Priestess lessons, in my own experience, are some of the hardest ones to learn and yet they are the most rewarding long-term.
Some lessons that The High Priestess may offer you are:
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A lesson on the non-linear structure of your intuition and how it will ebb and flow depending on your external world and physical self
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A lesson on connecting with the inner realms and the benefits that can bring
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A lesson on self-doubt and how to overcome it
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A lesson on trusting yourself and your initial instincts
The High Priestess as a Redirection
We often focus on solving our problems using our conscious mind, physical body or external world. This is because it is right in front of us, we can see it, touch it and make it tangible. All of these things make it seem like the right path to take, but it’s often just the easiest one. With The High Priestess, it redirects us inwards and asks us to think about our problem or challenge from the perspective of spirit and higher consciousness.
As a redirection, The High Priestess could symbolise a need to:
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Put more trust in your intuition and follow your feelings rather than your logical mind
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Do inner work that you may have been avoiding
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Direct your focus away from the material world and turn it inwards to give yourself some spiritual self-care
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Re-assess what it is you really need right now and whether the thing that is causing you issues is rooted inside your subconscious mind
The High Priestess - Number 2
The High Priestess is assigned the number of two within the Tarot cards. This number is known for its duality, partnership and fine balance, things that The High Priestess keeps a watchful eye on.
With The High Priestess and its number of two, we get a duality between body and soul. It acts as a vessel for the soul to express itself and so there’s a big learning curve between balancing what feels natural and what is expected.
The High Priestess - The Moon
The High Priestess Tarot astrological sign is The Moon. The Moon has often been seen a goddess figure due to its cycles and mysterious connections with the natural world.
The High Priestess is often pictured with a crescent moon on her lap or close to hand. A crescent moon represents the balance between dark and light, showing that some things are hidden from sight but are still there in the shadows.
The High Priestess - The Sage
The High Priestess is the first time we meet the archetype of The Sage in the Major Arcana. She is a sage like figure that often gives us guidance that may not be clear at first, but reveals itself when the time is right.
This High Priestess type sage is all about giving you the tools in order to figure things out on your own and in your own time.
