major arcana
Suit: Trumps Major Arcana
Also known as The Popess and The Priestess.
The High Priestess sits before the veil, quiet and watchful. Her wisdom comes by patience, intuition and reflection; what she guards is approached slowly and is never wholly displayed at once.
A card carries more than one history. Its place in the tarot pack, Golden Dawn path, Rider–Waite–Smith reading and later variants are kept beside their own sources, since the same name can do different work in different decks.
7 sourced claims: 4 traditional , 3 modern
This deck publishes no meanings, and none are supplied for it here. Marseille packs were printed for play, and the divinatory readings attached to them by Etteilla and his successors came later and from outside — presenting those as this deck's own would date them a century too early.
This deck calls the card Junon; it is filed here as The High Priestess and numbers it II.
This deck's book publishes no upright and reversed lists, so none are shown. Its account of the card is cited below rather than reproduced.
This is a Besançon-type pack: where most Marseille printings put the Popess and the Pope, it prints Junon — a substitution made to avoid giving offence, and one that leaves the numbering untouched. The numerals are additive — IIII, VIIII, XVIIII — not the subtractive IV, IX and XIX of modern usage.
Lequart, Paris, Marseille — BnF, Estampes et photographie, BOITE FOL-KH-383.
The High Priestess
A lunar priestess sits between the temple pillars before a pomegranate veil, holding a partly concealed Torah scroll as an emblem of revealed and hidden law.
A concise paraphrase of Waite's published explanation of the Pamela Colman Smith design, not a universal description of all historical decks.
Upright, Waite associates The High Priestess with mystery, silence, tenacity, wisdom and a future that has not yet been revealed. Reversed, the card can indicate passion, conceit or knowledge that remains superficial.
Waite himself warns that many fortune-telling allocations are artificial and arbitrary; these are historical Rider–Waite–Smith meanings, not assertions of fact.
Hermetic Qabalah
Book T establishes this Tarot-to-letter attribution. The path number and endpoints belong to this tradition's canonical Kircher arrangement.
Book T's formal title, Tree or elemental place, astrological attribution, and characteristic reading. This is the system used by the Hermetic Tree.
The Priestess of the Silver Star
The formal esoteric title printed in Book T.
ג · Gimel
A Golden Dawn correspondence, not a claim about the historical origin of the card or a universal Jewish letter-to-card system.
The Moon
Book T's attribution carried by the Hebrew letter and therefore by this path.
Change, alternation, increase and decrease, and fluctuation whose quality depends upon surrounding cards.
Paraphrased from Book T's brief meanings; its dignity method reads a card in relation to neighbouring cards rather than as a fixed keyword.
Historical context and places where influential decks or occult systems differ.
One of the twenty-one figured trumps plus the Fool found beside the four ordinary suits in historical tarot packs.
Museum history dates the earliest documentary references to the 1440s–1450s in northern Italy and identifies tarot's original use as a trick-taking game. The occult-Qabalistic reading is later.
| Relation | To | First attested |
|---|---|---|
| Tarot trump of | Path 13 · Gimel | 1888 CE |
| Hebrew-letter attribution | Gimel | 1888 CE |
| Astrological attribution | Moon | 1888 CE |