Querent
The High Priestess

Major Arcana · 2

The High Priestess

La Papesse · La Papessa · The Priestess of the Silver Star

The The High Priestess tarot card meaning runs through both orientations: upright, intuition, the unconscious, inner voice; reversed, secrets withheld, disconnection from intuition, repressed feelings. Below, its imagery across the Rider–Waite–Smith, Thoth, and Marseille decks, and what the tradition’s writers said about it.

Element
Water
Planet
Moon
Hebrew
Gimel
Numerology
2
Timing
Lunar cycles — within a moon's turn (28 days); Cancer season; the dark of the moon.

Upright

  • intuition
  • the unconscious
  • inner voice
  • mystery
  • divine feminine
  • dreams

Reversed

  • secrets withheld
  • disconnection from intuition
  • repressed feelings
  • superficial knowledge

The High Priestess Tarot Card Meaning

Upright

[object Object]

Reversed

[object Object]

The image, three ways

Rider–Waite–Smith

A serene woman seated between two pillars — one black (Boaz), one white (Jachin) — the entrance to the Temple of Solomon. A blue robe falls in folds resembling water; a crescent moon at her feet. A scroll bearing the letters TORA rests partly hidden in her lap. A veil of pomegranates hangs behind her.

Thoth

The Priestess of the Silver Star — veiled, crowned with the lunar disk of Isis, holding a bow. The image dissolves into geometric patterns, suggesting that the truth she guards is non-figurative.

Marseille

La Papesse — a seated female pope in robes, holding an open book. The 'female pope' image is medieval Europe's repressed memory of the divine feminine in religious authority.

Four ways a reversal speaks

After Mary K. Greer, Tarot Reversals (2002)

  1. 01 · denied

    Intuition refused; the inner voice overridden by external opinions or anxiety.

  2. 02 · shadow

    The withholder; secrets kept past their use; mystery as a tool of power.

  3. 03 · blocked

    The veil thickened into wall; the seeker can no longer access their own knowing.

  4. 04 · internalized

    Wisdom held privately past usefulness; the closed scroll, the unsaid premonition.

What the tradition says

  • A.E. Waite · 1910

    The Pictorial Key to the Tarot

    Secrets, mystery, the future as yet unrevealed; the woman who interests the Querent. The duality of light and dark mediated by the priestess.

  • Aleister Crowley · 1944

    The Book of Thoth

    The Priestess is the influence of the Moon — the path of Gimel that crosses the Abyss. She is initiation through the veil.

  • Rachel Pollack · 1980

    Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom

    The unconscious as a living, intelligent presence — not blankness but a mind-beneath-the-mind that speaks in symbol.

  • Sallie Nichols · 1980

    Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey

    The High Priestess is the anima in her unspoiled form — the inner feminine before relationship, before mothering, before being defined by the masculine. She holds the threshold between conscious and unconscious without crossing it; her teaching is that some thresholds are guarded for a reason.

  • Mary K. Greer · 1984

    Tarot for Your Self

    Greer frames the High Priestess as the inner consultant — the part of the querent that already knows the answer but speaks only in dream, body, and pause. The card asks: when did you last not-think long enough to hear yourself?

Shadow

The withholder; the gatekeeper of false mysteries; the woman who confuses passivity with depth; spiritual snobbery.

Archetypal role

The Mystic / The Oracle / The Hidden Wisdom / The Threshold Guardian

Historical notes

The 'female pope' card haunts the history of tarot. Some scholars connect her to the medieval legend of Pope Joan; others to the Cathar 'Manfreda Visconti,' rumored elected pope by a heretical sect. The image survived ecclesiastical disapproval because tarot was often coded as a game. Waite re-veiled her as the High Priestess to soften the heresy.

Neighbouring arcana

The High Priestess combinations

Bring this card into a question

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