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.