The High Priestess

  • Arcana Major
  • Number II
  • Figure on this site Frigg, who sees but does not tell
Historical evidence

In the earliest decks

The card is Italian in origin. In the earliest tarot packs it shows a woman wearing a papal crown, and it was later called the Popess (La Papessa in Italian). One of the oldest examples is the Popess in the Visconti-Sforza deck, dated to about 1450. Another is an untitled Popess on the Rosenwald Sheet, a sheet of uncut woodcut designs from the late 15th or early 16th century, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

The first pack with printed inscriptions is the woodcut Tarot de Marseille, which Wikipedia dates to the 18th century. There the card is labelled La Papesse and the woman wears a papal tiara. In the standard Marseille order it is the second trump, numbered II.

Who the figure was meant to be is not settled. Gertrude Moakley, in a 1966 study of the Visconti-Sforza cards, linked the Popess to Sister Manfreda, a nun of the Umiliati and a relative of the Visconti family. In Moakley’s account, a Lombard sect, the Guglielmites, expected Guglielma of Bohemia, who died in Milan in 1281, to return at Pentecost in 1300, and chose Manfreda as their pope. Manfreda was burned at the stake that autumn. Michael Dummett supported this identification in 1986. It remains an interpretation, and the cards carry no text that confirms it.

In Protestant countries after the Reformation, the card was sometimes tied to the legend of Pope Joan, a woman said to have been elected pope in disguise. That legend is a medieval and later story, not documented history.

Historical evidence

The Rider-Waite-Smith card

Pamela Colman Smith painted the Rider-Waite-Smith deck from instructions by A. E. Waite, and William Rider & Son of London first published it in December 1909. Both Smith and Waite had belonged to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

The Popess became the High Priestess, and the papal tiara was removed. She sits between two pillars, Boaz and Jachin (marked B and J), with a veil behind her decorated with palm leaves and pomegranates. She wears a blue mantle and a crown that Wikipedia describes as Hathor-like, a lunar crescent lies at her feet, and she holds a scroll marked TORA, which the article reads as “divine law”. Waite rejected the Pope Joan idea and linked the figure to the cult of Astarte; he later identified her with the Shekhinah, the indwelling presence of the divine in Jewish mystical writing. These are Waite’s readings, not features of the older decks.

Myth and literature · Quotation

Waite’s description

She has the lunar crescent at her feet, a horned diadem on her head, with a globe in the middle place, and a large solar cross on her breast. The scroll in her hands is inscribed with the word Tora, signifying the Greater Law, the Secret Law and the second sense of the Word. It is partly covered by her mantle, to shew that some things are implied and some spoken. She is seated between the white and black pillars—J. and B.—of the mystic Temple and the veil of the Temple is behind her: it is embroidered with palms and pomegranates. The vestments are flowing and gauzy, and the mantle suggests light—a shimmering radiance. She has been called Occult Science on the threshold of the Sanctuary of Isis, but she is really the Secret Church, the House which is of God and man. She represents also the Second Marriage of the Prince who is no longer of this world; she is the spiritual Bride and Mother, the daughter of the stars and the Higher Garden of Eden. She is, in fine, the Queen of the borrowed light, but this is the light of all. She is the Moon nourished by the milk of the Supernal Mother. […]

Myth and literature · Context

Later meanings

The attributions below were added to the card long after the Italian decks, and none belongs to the original game.

In the 1780s Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed that tarot preserved Egyptian religion. The Golden Dawn, working in the late 19th century, fixed a system in which the High Priestess corresponds to the Hebrew letter Gimel and to the Moon, on the path of the Tree of Life between Kether and Tiphareth. That system placed The Fool before the other 21 trumps.

These are occult systems built by their authors. They are not evidence about how the card was understood in 15th-century Italy.

Modern interpretation

As read on this site

This is the meaning used for readings here. Using the tarot to divine is a modern practice, and the Norse figure shown for each card is this site’s own association; the tarot began as an Italian card game. A short history is on the Tarot page.

Upright

Keywords: intuition, discretion, quiet knowing, withheld certainty, inner authority

Frigg knew Baldur's fate and said nothing — not from coldness, but because some knowledge has to be lived into rather than handed over. This card asks for patience with your own unfinished knowing. You may already sense how this resolves. The work right now isn't to force the answer into words before it's ready, and it isn't to chase certainty by interrogating everyone around you. It's to sit with the quiet, trust what you're sensing, and let the timing be the timing.

In general: You know more than you're letting yourself admit. Trust the quiet certainty over the loud doubt.

In love: A truth about the relationship that you sense but haven't said aloud, possibly because saying it makes it real. It's already real.

In work: Insight worth keeping to yourself a little longer — not from secrecy, but because it isn't fully formed enough to survive being argued with yet.

Reversed

Keywords: secrecy, anxious withholding, disconnection from intuition, overdue disclosure

Withheld truth has a shelf life. Held too long, the thing that was once discretion turns into a low hum of anxiety that colors everything around it — the unspoken thing becomes the only thing. Frigg's silence worked because it came from acceptance, not fear. If your silence comes from fear of what happens when the words get said, that's the sign it's time to say them, however badly the timing seems to fit.

In general: The thing you're not saying is taking up more space than the thing itself would. Let it out before it gets bigger in the dark.

In love: Something important and unspoken is sitting between you. Silence here isn't neutral; it's accumulating interest.

In work: A concern or piece of feedback you've been sitting on past its useful date. The discomfort of saying it is smaller than the cost of not.

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