What this deck does differently
The Thoth deck calls this card The Priestess rather than The High Priestess. Book T titles it The Priestess of the Silver Star.
major arcana
No image of this card
Lady Frieda Harris painted the deck between 1938 and 1943; it was first published in 1969, seven years after her death in 1962. The paintings remain in copyright until 2032 in the UK and EU and 2064 in the United States, so no card images or substitutes appear here.
See the deck at its publisher ↗
II
The Priestess
The Priestess of the Silver Star
Suit: Trumps Major Arcana
Also known as The Popess and The Priestess.
Core interpretation
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
In the Thoth deck
The Book of Thoth remains in copyright. The catalogue therefore gives the deck's titles, ranks and numbering beside the Golden Dawn material it inherits, while citing Crowley by page without reproducing his text.
This deck calls the card The Priestess; 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.
Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris, Thoth — Part Two: The Atu (Keys or Trumps).
The same card in the Rider–Waite–Smith deck
The High Priestess
What the card shows
ModernA 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.
Divinatory meaning
ModernUpright, 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.
Tree of Life association
Hermetic Qabalah
Path 13 · ג Gimel · Kether to Tiphareth
- Letter
- Gimel — Camel
- Planet
- The Moon
Book T establishes this Tarot-to-letter attribution. The path number and endpoints belong to this tradition's canonical Kircher arrangement.
Sources (2)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — The Twenty-Two Keys of the Book, pp. 5–7
Golden Dawn correspondences 4 sourced claims
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.
Sources (1)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — The Titles of the Symbols, pp. 5–7
ג · Gimel
A Golden Dawn correspondence, not a claim about the historical origin of the card or a universal Jewish letter-to-card system.
Sources (2)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — The Twenty-Two Keys of the Book, pp. 5–7
The Moon
Book T's attribution carried by the Hebrew letter and therefore by this path.
Sources (2)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — The Twenty-Two Keys of the Book, pp. 5–7
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.
Sources (1)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — Brief Meanings of Twenty-Two Keys, pp. 46–47
History and variants 1 sourced claim
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.
Sources (1)
- Before Fortune-Telling: The History and Structure of Tarot Cards , Metropolitan Museum of Art online article, 2016 — paragraphs 1–4
Correspondences 3 sourced correspondences
| Relation | To | First attested |
|---|---|---|
| Tarot trump of | Path 13 · Gimel | 1888 CE |
| Hebrew-letter attribution | Gimel | 1888 CE |
| Astrological attribution | Moon | 1888 CE |