Today’s energies revolve around the reversed High Priestess. In order to talk about this Major Arcana card in reverse, it’s first important to talk about her as she shows herself upright.
The High Priestess, key II, comes directly after the potent burst of energy by the Magician. Her magic is no less powerful, no more hidden than her Magician counterpart, yet it manifests in an entirely different way. She, positioned between her two pillars, embodies the connection between human and the Divine, the magician and the source of magic. She does not need a go-between; she is both the veil and the rending of the veil, giving light to that which had formerly been obscured to all but the initiates. When the High Priestess arrives, know that you are an initiate, no – you are beyond the need for initiation and are a part of the grand tableau in your own right.
She is attuned to the Flow. She is a witch with her hands in the heart of magic. She is her own bridge to the Divine. Be still, and know who you are.
So what does the reversed High Priestess have to tell us?
If you’re anything like me, you don’t read the reversed Major Arcana as the opposite of their upright counterpart so much as seeing them as hidden or blocked aspects, a place where the energy has either not been allowed to come into fruition, or one that works behind the scenes, in the innermost part of the psyche.
Reversed, the High Priestess looks like a bridge to the dark places that reside inward, caught in the space between low-level reactions and conscious thought. The subconscious, where she dwells now, is quiet, dark, but brooding with things – memories? fear? unwillingness to look into the face of your personal reality? – that keep her from moving onward and upward, through the veil.
The reversed High Priestess, if coming from a place of fear and control rather than that quiet, inner stillness can look a lot like the Hierophant: focused on scripts and rules rather than the heart-knowledge of intuition. Instead of lovingly accepting magic as the powerful and intuitive, living thing that it is, she begins to place excessive rules and boundaries. Her pillars no longer stand for the bridge into the Divine that she holds up with her psyche, but rather, it becomes a gate by which she keeps out the ideas she dislikes, the ones that hurt too much, or that go against pre-decided beliefs.
I realized I was stuck in this impasse of the reversed High Priestess when I recognized that I felt that I needed a script for every spell, prayer, and ritual I uttered.
No sooner could I feel the heart-pull of magic than I quashed it down with anxious thoughts – I need to get to the theory before I can do the practical, I need to write myself a play-by-play script before I can cleanse, I need to find a prescribed prayer book before I can express the longings of my heart. My anxious fear disallowed me from taking the steps into that quiet, open, whirling magic of intuition. My paranoia of somehow “doing it wrong” kept me from fulfilling the welling within me that desired communion with the Divine, with the Flow of magic.
Focus on letting go and opening those paths to the heart.
There are practical steps to take to allow the High Priestess to move and live and breathe, and a lot of them involve eschewing steps altogether and being still with yourself.
- meditate on the “hidden inward,” the dark, soft places where the deepest aspects of your magic resides
- opening your eyes and heart to receive signs and symbols, seeing what is really there
- listening when your intuition or your magic speaks, hearing the quiet (or, in some cases, quite loud!) voice that urges an impromptu prayer, a needful shield, or a pop-up altar on the dining room table
Breathe into that mystery. Allow yourself the freedom to reach into the dark-light of the Flow. You are magic.
brush of stone 