High Priestess

Survey of the Tarot

Western Civilization, it might be said, began in the ritual at Delphi, in the sanctuary of Pythia, the Oracle, the High Priestess. The site at Delphi was well established by the 8th century BC, while there is evidence a sacred shrine had been there in some capacity since the 1600’s BC. Delphi was there through the rise of the empire, declining as the empire declined.

The Christianization of the West drove out any notion of the High Priestess, though she will ever exist as an archetype, and as a foundation of the West. In some sense, more than anything, she is what we are lacking, both men and women, a deep awareness of the divine feminine. The number 2 card, third in the Tarot deck, following the Magician¹ and the Fool², she is a reminder about the depths of the unconscious, the power of the Moon, and the mystery of the feminine.

She is usually depicted as veiled, because she sees with her inner eye. She is the protector of the secret doctrine. Here she holds two keys, gold and silver, representing the keys to life and the spirit, “the silver moon key unlocks the mysteries of the first Adam, the terrestrial man…the golden sun key represents the regeneration of man - the heavenly man.” The veil hanging in the gateway between the pillars Jachin and Boaz is the veil of the unconscious. The book she carries is the Writ of God, she is His interpreter. She has the crescent moon at the peak of her crown, symbolizing her relation to it, as she is a reflection of it. She wears the sign of Mercury and the highest intellect. “The upright crown signifies the Divine Wisdom, the Mother of Mysteries, the Mother of Christ; the inverted crown symbolizes the Black Madonna.” She is both the Eternal Virgin and the goddess of fertility.

She has the power to envelop you with maternal calm and the protective embrace of the Great Mother, while also terrifying, revealing to you the deepest darkest regions of the self, what we will not acknowledge about ourselves, going back to the dawn of sapien.

She is the guardian at the gateway. Protector of the mysteries.

“Eternal virgin, clothed in a luminous veil of light, light that is not the perfect manifestation, of the Eternal Spirit, but as the veil that hides that spirit, doing so effectively because of the incomparably dazzling brilliance, the light and the body of light, the truth behind the veil of light, the soul of light.”

She is akin to Binah in the Cabala, giving Form to the Masculine Force of Chokmah; without the feminine there is no Form.

The High Priestess as archetype is buried deep. It has not even been portrayed in cinema, in anything but caricature. The closest I have found in literature is Vivien Le Vay, in Dion Fortune’s books, The Sea Priestess and Moon Magic, though Vivien is mostly a solitary practitioner, as there is no broader community to look to her for guidance (and of course for Vivien, out of self-preservation.) Vivien is named after the young priestess/sorceress who beguiled Merlin to his doom, according to myth, though the Vivien of Fortune’s work is about healing her race.

If modern Americans think of a high priestess at all it is with trepidation, as if such a being could only be dark, the lone sorceress out in the forest, who every one avoids (until they are sick and need healing) when in fact, the High Priestess in the ideal is a conduit, drawing down fertility and health for the community.

Another reason, in my estimation, why women are not well, why liberals are not breeding and the health of a majority of Americans is a disaster.

Women Are Actually Not Okay

Any young girl in America who might show signs of a personality anything like Pythia or Vivien Le Vay is likely to be on SSRI’s before she has gone through puberty, before she is old enough to take responsibility for herself. Some predator is likely to find her, be that the pharmaceutical industry, the Mental Health Cartel, the Hollywood Matrix, some New Age cult, or some too usual ill-dignified masculine. Even if she were to escape the notice of such, what we have for normie culture in America is something like the opposite of cultivating the divine, sacred feminine. What is a young girl or woman to do with High Priestess energy, in a culture that has no tolerance or understanding for that, that mostly seems to want to profane or prostitute it?

There are a few women on Substack who embody something of the High Priestess. They have found a place where such care and concern for the community is valued by the community:

The Starfire Codes by Demi Pietchell

,

Freya India

, Kimberly Steele,

Anya Shakh

,

Charlotte Pendragon

,

Jacqueline Rendell

(I posted Kimberly’s site because she does not allow mentions, my phone will not link her website to her name, and substack has not worked in any capacity in more than a week, on my Linux computer. One of the reasons I have not posted an article in ten days.)

I’m not saying these women are High Priestesses, I merely mean of all the women on Substack I am subscribed to, these woman represent the archetype best, IMHO.

Dion Fortune’s Vivien le Vey is a priestess of Isis. Isis was the primultimate female goddess of ancient Egypt, the mother of all the gods. Dion Fortune was a priestess of Isis, she wrote a book of rituals for Isis and Pan, so there remains a religious culture of worship of the divine feminine, however fragmented and scattered that culture might be in the West.

If you do an online search for Isis, the goddess will not appear. Not even if you type isis religion. Every search of Isis brings up Islamic State, ISIS - the Caliphate that was set up in parts of Iraq, Syria and Kurdistan, by that Caliph al-Baghdadi, who spent all that time getting programmed in that CIA blacksite.

It is not just Christ that has been profaned by globohomo. They have profaned Isis, like they have profaned everything sacred in the West.

Here in America we have been poisoned for as long as I have been alive, getting worse with every passing year. Pollinator collapse is the canary in that mining of our general health and welfare, going on 15 years now. It does not seem surprising at all that cancer in the reproductive parts of women is so common, in a society that has so little care or concern for the idea of a divine feminine energy innate throughout all creation.

Vivien le Vey, according to Dion Fortune, is not fully effective as a priestess - there are rituals she simply cannot do - unless she is in polarity in ritual with a man capable of maintining that polarity with her.

I think there is a wealth of information about the idea of divine feminine, in healing the divide in the West between the sexes. Of course a divine feminine necessitates a divine masculine. There cannot be one without the other, and we have abandoned both, to our great detriment.

The High Priestess card in the Tarot is a good reminder, of the divine feminine, of the depths of the unconscious, of the ecstatic dance and worship deep in the beginnings of the West, of men and women who understood the power of polarity between them, who built a civilization with it. Now that polarization is a mess, men and women deeply confused about sex, in a civilization deep in decline.

The High Priestess calls you to reflect, to honor, and to polarize the divine feminine - to be the foundation of a new civilization, rising out of the West.

Happy Beltane aka May Day

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