The High Priestess and The Empress: Inner and outer worlds

Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article tells you how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc

By Sarah Taylor

This week’s article was born of a serendipitous slip. I felt prompted to email Eric and ask whether he had any particular ideas for a tarot article, joking in my email that my fingers always want to type “tart” instead of “tarot”. (Rich fodder for those inclined to believe that finger-slips are no accident.) His response started thus: “Tart — What about women in tarot…?”

What about it, indeed. It seemed apt, given the focus on Venus and The Moon in Len’s Daily Astrology postings, and Lisa Roberts’s analysis of the four asteroid Goddesses over the weekend.

So I took my Rider-Waite Smith tarot down from my bookcase, separated out the major arcana, and started looking for inspiration. I found it almost immediately in The High Priestess (card 2) and The Empress (card 3)… who just happen to represent The Moon and Venus respectively. How about that.

This is the first time that I have taken a really good look at The High Priestess and The Empress side-by-side; and I’m wondering why I didn’t see the extent of the correlations and contrasts before. The two, together, give us a picture that embodies the physical and the spiritual, the outer and the inner — working in parallel as two balanced entities of the feminine principle.

Let’s see where our explorations take us today when we look at both cards:

The High Priestess

I have always been drawn to The High Priestess. I think that many tarot readers are, given that she guards the gateway between the spiritual and the physical realms, and therefore has the ability to mediate between the two.

The High Priestess from the Rider-Waite Smith deck is richly symbolic in this respect. At her feet is a crescent Moon, describing the lunar phase where psychic ability is heightened, when the veil between the spiritual and physical worlds seems thinner. The pillars to her right and left are black and grey respectively. I’ve read different explanations for the pillars and the letters on them, but the one that makes the most sense links them to “Boaz” and “Jachin” — the two pillars in Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. The temple was said to have housed the Ark of the Covenant. In our card, The High Priestess is associated with ancient wisdom, passed from the divine to mankind, and much of her work, psychic as it is, is hidden from view, unable to be fully seen and understood.

The dominant colour of the card is blue. This is the colour of the throat chakra, and ties in with one of the principal challenges that someone who typifies The High Priestess archetype has to contend with: accepting and working from the understanding that the path calls for the ability to speak and live one’s own truth in service to divine will. The path of The High Priestess is not always an easy one, because she often has a greater degree of access to intangible information than most. She might know and understand things that others do not believe. She is an outsider by virtue of the fact that she is not completely of this world. However, if she dedicates herself to a fearless encounter with spirit, and is able to hold the tension between those encounters and her encounters with the mundane, then The High Priestess is in balance.

When she is out of balance as an archetype in our lives, then the shadow of The High Priestess comes into play. She may lack a belief in her own abilities, never comfortably inhabiting her role as intermediary and therefore never giving full expression to her gifts. Or she may lose her bearings and believe that she holds a sense of truth when her message in fact does not come from spirit: she confuses the earthly with the spiritual — an oracle who instead looks at her own reflection and mistakenly draws ‘truth’ from there.

Whereas the figure of The High Priestess, the pillars that flank her, and The Moon at her feet are primarily a single colour each, the screen behind her tells a different story. It is vibrant, bright, eye-catching. It asks for our attention as much as the directed gaze of The Priestess herself. Although it depicts the physical world — pomegranates, palms, ivy — the fact that they are set in a distinct pattern tells me that they are symbolic rather than simply representative of nature. They are nature in service to an organising principle — like The High Priestess herself.

The Empress

By contrast, the pomegranates in The Empress seem to be in service to her. She is not separate from them, but wears them; they are not held in a distinct pattern as much as tumble down her robe. Whereas The High Priestess operates at the juncture between two worlds, and is therefore the messenger of spirit, The Empress holds dominion over the physical world.

On this card, blues and greys give way to yellow, green, red, orange. The lips of The High Priestess are unadorned, and her hair is covered as an act of reverence; while The Empress’s mouth is red, her hair long and loose around her neck and shoulders. In her right hand, she holds a gold sceptre, the handle fashioned into a head of wheat (earthy foil to the cross on The High Priestess’s chest). Her left hand rests on her left knee, legs slightly apart. She is regal, but not subject to the strictures of too much formality. Like nature herself, she has freedom of movement. On her head is a crown of stars — the heavens have a place in this picture too.

The Empress expresses the archetype of The Mother — whether as Mother Nature, or as mother on a personal level. Trees in full leaf range across the background. A river cascades into a waterfall. Ripe wheat jockeys for position in the foreground, ready to be picked. The red of the bolster and throw under her are reminiscent of the blood that gives and promises life.

And yet a flowing of blood is also evocative of death, and this is also inherent in The Empress. As ruler of the physical, death plays its own part in the cycles over which she presides. Death and life are the dual experience of this card — though in this image death seems to reside in the ‘spaces between’: it is an absence, implied, rather than a presence. Perhaps the stars on The Empress’s crown also express this aspect: the stars as souls in the sky; the stars that we become when we lose our physical form and ascend to the firmament.

The idea of death also comes to the fore as the Shadow Mother — who denies life rather than nurtures it, who murders her young, or abandons them to fend for themselves. We evoke the archetype of the Shadow Mother, for instance, when we eschew our role as caretakers of our environment, instead choosing a route that mines the planet of its resources and then pollutes, rather than replenishes, it. Given that The Empress concerns herself with the cycles of nature, we wander astray when that cycle is either broken or distorted.

The High Priestess, The Empress. Spiritual, physical. Contemplation, sensation. Midwife, mother. Care of the soul, care of body. Liminal, absolute. Both are aspects of the feminine that we all embody, whether consciously or unconsciously. When we are unconscious of their archetypes at play in our lives, we can fail to see the transformative opportunities that they offer us, whether through living them out positively, or confronting their shadows within us. When we do so consciously, we begin to bear the burden of personal and collective responsibility, but with that come deeper meaning and an expanded sense of self.