The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, August 17, 2014

By Sarah Taylor

What is the woman who sits at the centre of our reading dreaming into reality?

What is she envisioning with her contemplation, her attentiveness? What fronds of awareness is she sending out in order to gather information so subtle that it is often dismissed?

What information do you have the ability to gather towards yourself that is so subtle you often doubt, then dismiss, it?

The High Priestess is receptivity. She is a ‘cosmic antenna’ for what is not yet manifest, and which cannot be examined by the five senses.

The High Priestess is the archetype that is active in us when we are tuned into our intuition — when we are attuned to the forces that shape the universe but which remain out of eye-sight and ear-shot.

“I can feel it in my bones.” “My spidey-sense is tingling.” “I can’t tell you why; I just know.”

These are the phrases that come to us when we are in High Priestess mode. And this mode has two different faces to it, shadow and light.

The shadow High Priestess is active whenever the information that we are receiving is attached to an agenda — ours or others’. Take fear, for example. This is where intuition is really superstition, a message that exhorts us to think, feel or act in a particular way in order to feel safe. But safe from what? And what is ‘safety’ anyway?

Another is our unconscious conditioning: when our antenna picks up what we believe to be a message from the Higher Self, but which is really a message tempered through the lenses of our parents, other authority figures, cultural conditioning.

The light aspect of The High Priestess is where she is accessing higher wisdom. For you, this is where you are in communication with the part of you that serves your highest interests when it comes to the idea of ‘truth’. It is the truth that is whispered to you that hides nothing from you, that is free of obstruction and obfuscation. It has no interest in self-interest. It is information, pure and simple.

How to tell the difference, then, between light and shadow High Priestess mode? Here are three signs that tend to indicate where she is in her fullest expression — or where you are expressing your innate higher wisdom to yourself:

First, your dreams. If intuitive hunches are pathways to our inner wisdom, then our dreams are superhighways. Consider working with your dreams with someone who is an adept, or — another method that’s highly effective — talk your dream through to someone from the first-person perspective and in the present tense, and see what reveals itself to you.

Second, if information comes as a hit (often feeling as if it emerged from nowhere) that bypasses thought, emotion, and logic, then adopt the hypothesis that you’re communing with something larger than you.

Third, messages from your intuition come calmly and firmly stated. If thoughts are jockeying for position inside you, go for the one that’s quiet, asks nothing of you, and reveals itself as a ‘felt sense of knowing’ that has a physical quality of groundedness attached to it.

All of these will stand you in good stead for the potentials that are waiting in the wings for you, in the form of the two cards on either side of The High Priestess.

Aces are the pure, untapped potential of their suits. The clue here is in the word “untapped.” That they are present in the reading means that they are available to you; but if you want to use them, then they ask for active participation on your part. This comes with looking out for opportunities, looking inwards at what your body is telling you, asking your heart for guidance, and ‘taking the gap’ that appears and which leads the way to an encounter with something new.

Really, it comes down to body and heart. They are both portals to an experience that might feel otherworldly, but which is also world-expanding. Either way — Disks or Cups — they have something to show you. Together — when you sense that alignment that comes with inner balance, which is when The High Priestess is at her most empowered and powerful — they have the quality of a quantum leap.

Not everything real is something you can prove empirically. That is something worth trusting.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: Ace of Disks (the pure, infinite potential of earth), The High Priestess (Moon), Ace of Cups (the pure, infinite potential of water)

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 explains how to use the spread.