The High Priestess and Fidelity
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The High Priestess is above all a paragon of fidelity. Sallie Nichols describes her archetypal mission, in part, as “obedience to true spirit,” but here I will attempt to ground that observation in more mundane terms.
When the High Priestess appears in a reading, it suggests the need to root out any irregularity that may have crept into the situation and reinforce expectations for a return to the straight-and-narrow. Hers is not the fidelity of human affairs but the strict adherence to a higher calling in which ironclad rectitude is more important than devotion to relativistic morality. She keeps her head to the sky and her hem out of the mud. As the purest expression of Lunar energy, she brings a calm insight and a measured mildness (but not meekness) to any matter of concern. She is chaste virtue personified, more Artemis than Luna, and, in the words of science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein, as the unsentimental avatar of the Moon she can indeed be a “harsh mistress.” (I’m reminded of the old Chiffon Margarine commercial, in which thunder and lightning swirled around a stern-looking woman who intoned menacingly “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!”)
The reticence that is most often seen as secretiveness may in fact only be introversion, as she is “in the world but not of it.” She is peering aloofly into “the Great Beyond” and would have absolutely no problem with the advice given by Polonius to Laertes in Hamlet: “This above all: to thine own self be true.” When this card shows up, its focus on individual integrity could be the most useful advice to give the querent. In the 7×3 trump-card tableau, the Hermit sits directly beneath the High Priestess, and that is the card of keeping one’s own counsel and following one’s own path, with the High Priestess providing the inspiration from her “high seat.”
Because the High Priestess occupies such an exalted position, it can be difficult to bring her down to Earth for the benefit of the seeker. I’ve told clients humorously “She doesn’t want to talk to you right now,” but that doesn’t have to be the case. Honoring one’s self-defining principles and values while shunning conformist inclinations come to mind as the first piece of wisdom to come out of her inner sanctum. She is not so much a maverick or iconoclast as a force unto herself, beholden to no-one else’s agenda. I’ve had two clients who benefited from this insight: one woman was having trouble with her partner’s two adult sons, who were snubbing her when they came to visit him, and the other was agonizing over whether to leave her secure job and strike out on her own entrepreneurial journey. In both cases I told them to listen to the “still, small voice” of their own sense of righteous purpose and act accordingly.
Interestingly, the first woman received the Hermit as the follow-up card to the High Priestess, and she immediately asked me “Does this mean that I should go into my office and close the door when they come over?” (To which I replied “That would certainly send a message.”) The second one I told to trust her willpower, self-discipline and judgment since they wouldn’t steer her wrong. The High Priestess didn’t say “Do it,” just “If you do it, I’m on your side.” If we don’t expect cheer-leading or indignant scolding from her and only quiet advocacy, we won’t be inclined to either over-extend or under-perform. This is, after all, a card of the “middle way” like Justice, Temperance and the Star, not of extremes.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on December 7, 2023.
