The High Priestess Tarot

This second tarot card is named the High Priestess - or the Popess - as the woman that is drawn on the card wears a pontifical tiara.

She is also supposed to represent Isis, an Egyptian divinity, wife to Osiris. 

The symbol associated with the High Priestess is wisdom; her color is blue (the color of wisdom) and the sobriety of her costume links to quality development.

This major arcanum is a very positive card of the tarot in that it's also the Yin element.

The High Priestess (or Popess) has several meanings, all pointing to feminine elements. Here are a few of them.

The card placed in the right position:

• Pregnancy
• Knowledge
• Mother
• Nature
• Perspicacity
• Wisdom
• Effectiveness

The card placed in a reversed position:

• Immoderate passion
• Painful love
• Superficiality
• Ignorance
• Hopelessness

During a spread that concerns a man, the Popess (or High Priestess) might represent the hidden side of his life - like a mistress, for example.

In order to help you learn how to interpret the meaning of the High Priestess, I'm going to show you an example of a spread that includes this tarot card.

Let's say that a woman would like to learn more about the future of her couple.

She's going to select four cards that the fortune-teller will place as follows:

• the first card to the left
• the second card to the right
• the third card on top of the space
• the fourth card at the bottom of the space (see picture of Simple Cross spread).

Let's imagine that the cards are the following ones:

• First card: the Lovers
• Second card: the High Priestess (or the Popess)
• Third card: the Moon
• Fourth card: the Tower

Here's how we're going to interpret the cards:

Our consultant is married to a men who's facing some troubles and, while he does love his wife (the Lovers), he has a second hidden life and thus has a mistress (the High Priestess) ; our consultant seems to be aware about it or suspects that something happens to her husband (the Moon) but doesn't want to believe this can happen to her and realizes that something is broken in her life, that happiness is a thing from the past (the Tower).  

Now what?

The prediction above wasn't the kind of prediction anyone would like to learn, uh? Anyway, we're going to do some synthesis and try to find out as to whether our consultant can expect something more positive.

A synthesis is a simple addition of the number of each card spread - one uses numerology to get a fifth "virtual" card.

And so we are going to sum up all these numbers:

• The Lovers --> 6
• The High Priestess --> 2
• The Moon --> 18
• The Tower --> 16

Total = 42

However, there's no tarot major arcanum number 42, this is the reason why we're going to sum up 4 + 2 ; which gives us 6 as result.

The Lovers as synthesis is of course more positive than the Tower. Chances are that our consultant is going to communicate with her husband to try to find the best solution as possible ; which we can obviously try to discover with a new spread of the cards.