Long Blog Entry
Word Count: 497
The High Priestess
The card of the High Priestess portrays a slender, ethereal young woman with pale skin, long black hair and dark eyes, dressed in a simple white gown. On her head is a golden crown. In her right hand, she holds a pomegranate, split open to show its multitude of seeds. In her left hand a bunch of white narcissi trail to the ground. On either side of the stairway on which she stands is a pillar; the left one is black, the right one white. Behind her, at the top of the staircase, a doorway opens out on to the rich green landscape, which appears in the card of the Empress.
The pomegranate is both the fruit of the dead and of conjugal love because of its many seeds. Thus, Persephone’s hidden world is fertile and full of undeveloped creative potential. The black and white pillars reflect the duality contained in the underworld. Both creative potentials and destructive impulses are hidden in the darkness of the unconscious. The narcissus, which Persephone picked when Hades abducted her, was associated with the dead because of its ghostly color and its annual emergence from the winter earth.
On an inner level, Persephone, the High Priestess, is an image of the link with that mysterious inner world to which depth psychology has given the name ‘the unconscious.’ It is as though, beneath and beyond the ordinary daylight world which we believe to be reality, lies another, hidden world, full of riches and potentials, which we cannot penetrate without the consent of its invisible rulers. Persephone, the High Priestess, is an embodiment of that part of us which knows the secrets of the inner world.
But she can only be dimly sensed by waking consciousness, and appears through the fleeting fragments of dreams, or through those strange coincidences which make us begin to wonder whether there might be some hidden pattern at work in our lives. Persephone is a seductive and fascinating figure, but she does not speak of her secrets. in the same way the night-world of the unconscious, glimpsed through dreams, fantasies and intuitions, is also seductive and fascinating. However, when we try to grasp it with the intellect and ‘master’ it for our own purposes, it remains mute and slides away. The dark world of Persephone provides only shadowy glimpses of patterns and movements at work within the individual, which require patience and the passage of time before they can be brought into the light of day.
On a divinatory level, the appearance of the High Priestess in a spread augurs the heightening of the powers of intuition, and implies that there will be an encounter of some kind with the hidden inner world which Persephone rules. The individual is drawn inexplicably to this world through an interest in the occult or the esoteric, or through the effects of a powerful dream or the uncanny sense that ‘something’ is at work in one’s life.