The Priestess

The Popess/ Priestess

The Priestess/ Popess. A woman seated, a headdress, a book or scroll depending on the Tarot deck, sometimes inscribed TORA or TORAH. The half-hidden text. The teaching not yet fully given. The knowledge that is to come.

“I am an instrument in the shape / of a woman trying to translate pulsations / into images for the relief of the body / and the reconstruction of the mind.”

(Adrienne Rich, Planetarium)

The High Priestess is numbered Two. After the solitary will of the Magician, we enter the realm of duality, of relationship, of what is held between. She sits between the pillars. The pause between exhale and inhale.

Background

In older versions of the Tarot de Marseilles, this card was called La Papesse/Popess. A transgressive figure. A woman who held authority the institution sought to deny her. In some traditions, she is identified with Pope Joan, the legendary woman who concealed her gender to access learning and power. In others, she is the Gnostic Sophia, the epitome of divine wisdom. The earliest surviving examples of the card, from fifteenth-century Northern Italy, depict a woman wearing ecclesiastical dress, often with a papal tiara, holding a book or religious insignia.

The earliest depiction of The Popess is from the Visconti-Sforza Tarot, attributed to the workshop of Bonifacio Bembo, dating approximately 1450 –1480. So what did she represent? Is she an embodiment of forbidden female authority? A symbolic inversion of the Church? A representation of an alternative spiritual power?

There is a theory that the original Popess might have been inspired by the medieval woman Maifreda da Pirovano. Maifreda was associated with the Guglielmite religious movement in Milan in the late thirteenth century. The movement believed that Guglielma of Bohemia was a divine figure whose spiritual mission would culminate in a new age of the Holy Spirit. After Guglielma’s death, Maifreda became a prominent figure among her followers. Some accounts suggest she was regarded as a spiritual successor and even expected to assume a papal role.The movement was investigated by the Inquisition. Maifreda was condemned and executed in 1300. The theory proposes that the Popess might be a visual echo of this history of female religious authority.

Around 1781 the Popess transitioned to the High Priestess tarot card that we recognise today. This shift was not simply a change of terminology. It was a change of symbolic territory. The female Pope was a direct challenge to a particular institutional hierarchy, carrying the insignia of an institution. She embodied a position of power within an established hierarchy. The High Priestess transformed into a more universal spiritual figure, associated with esoteric knowledge, initiation, intuition and the mysteries, the guardian of knowledge that is secret, inaccessible, initiatory and sometimes forbidden.

The Priestess/Popess is the card before the Empress, before the generative abundance of the mother. She is the inner knowing that precedes outward expression. You cannot skip her and go straight to flowering. The seed must first know itself in the dark.

In the Irish tradition, she is Brigid, the keeper of the sacred flame— the flame at Kildare was tended by nineteen priestesses who kept the flame alive. Brigid holds poetry, healing, and smith-craft simultaneously. She knows things. Her feast day, Imbolc (February 1st), the dark of winter is that liminal moment when the light begins its slow return, still invisible, but shifting.

Cerridwen from Welsh mythology is both magician and priestess. She watches over the stirring of her cauldron of divine inspiration: awen, for a year and a day. The knowledge she brews is not meant for just anyone. It is earned through time, through tending, through the willingness to sit with the dark and not demand the light arrive on schedule. It is to welcome the dark as much as the light, to find balance in both, and the transitions from one to the other.

In Greek mythology Pythia was the title given to the title of the high priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in central Greece. She served as its oracle— the Oracle of Delphi. Sometimes known as the Pythoness she sat above a chasm in the earth and spoke what arose through her.

The High Priestess is wise, she teaches that there is a difference between ego-knowledge, which we construct, and knowledge from a deeper source, older— ancestral memory, culture, or deep intuition.

There is also Enheduanna, Sargon’s daughter. She was the high priestess of the moon deity Nanna-Suen at his temple in Ur (in modern-day Southern Iraq). The celestial nature of her occupation is reflected in her name— “Ornament of Heaven”. she was a poet, and is widely recognised as the earliest named author in literary history. She composed hymns to Inanna, goddess of love, war and transformation.

A political rebellion led by Lugalanne resulted in Enheduanna being forcibly removed from her temple. He stripped her of the insignia of her office, threatened her and drove her into exile. In an autobiographical poem, The Exaltation of Inanna, she describes her expulsion, her despair and her appeal to the goddess. Thereafter, she turned away from Nanna, the god she had served because he had failed her and instead called upon Inanna. The goddess responded and Enheduanna was eventually restored to her position.

The Cumaean Sibyl was a prophetess associated with Apollo, living near Cumae in southern Italy. According to Ovid, Apollo desired her and offered to grant her a wish. She picked up a handful of sand and asked to live for as many years as there were grains in her hand. Apollo granted her wish, but she forgot to ask for eternal youth. She also refused to become his lover. So she lived for hundreds upon hundreds of years, growing progressively older and smaller. Eventually, her body faded and only her voice remained.

In Petronius’s Satyricon, there is that final, haunting image. The Sibyl hangs in a bottle or jar, so tiny that children can ask her what she wants. She replies, she wants to die. Incidentally, T. S. Eliot used this passage as the epigraph to The Waste Land.

I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her: “Sibyl, what do you want?” she answered: “I want to die.” (Elliot)

Another story describes how Aeneas seeks to enter the underworld to visit his dead father, and it is the Sibyl who guides him. She tells him he must first find the golden bough hidden in a sacred grove, and take it as a gift for Persephone. She becomes the guide between the living and the dead.

Shadow

With each archetype there is shadow. For the High Priestess it is that knowledge can be withheld or hidden; secrets can become wounds; wisdom can be used as a tool for control- a corrupted oracle; what is known is weaponised rather than offered/given. There is also the shadow of inaccessibility: the one who withdraws so deeply into inner life that they cannot be reached. The mystic that becomes dissociated or practices spiritual bypassing. The veil that becomes a wall.

One example: The Vestal Virgins were priestesses responsible for tending the sacred flame of Vesta in Rome. Their chastity was a central condition of their religious office. Their bodies were understood to embody the purity and continuing wellbeing of Rome itself. To break their vows was considered a religious offence. Their punishment was to be buried alive.

In the reign of Domitian, the chief Vestal, Cornelia, was accused of violating her vow. She maintained her innocence. The emperor ordered her condemnation. The Roman writer Pliny the Younger describes how Domitian summoned the religious authorities away from their usual meeting place, condemned Cornelia without giving her a hearing and ordered her to be buried alive. Pliny was convinced she had been unjustly condemned.

Cornelia went to her death insisting upon her innocence. As she was being lowered into the underground chamber, her clothing caught. She stopped to adjust it herself, refusing the executioner’s assistance. Pliny describes this as her final preservation of dignity. The shadow – Purity becomes a form of imprisonment. The sacred body becomes institutional property. The authority that is supposed to protect becomes the authority that destroys.

There is also the story of Cassandra. During the fall of Troy, Cassandra takes sanctuary at the statue of Athena. But Ajax of Lokris tears her away and rapes her at the sacred statue. This is not simply an assault on Cassandra. It is a violation of the sanctuary itself. Ajax has committed sacrilege. Athena is enraged by the desecration and in retaliation the Greeks encounter disaster on their journey home. Thereafter, every year, the Locrians are required to send two young women to serve Athena at Troy, and so it was for a thousand years.

Bibliomancy

The Papesse/ Priestess is often represented with a book on her hands. This is the book of knowledge, and can take many forms. There is a practice called bibliomancy: the use of sacred books and specific words and verses for “magical medicine,” or for divination.

The practice: the diviner selects a book that is believed to hold truth. Open it at a random page, place your finger in a place on that page. The sentences that emerge are believed to hold some message for you. Approach with a light heart and curiosity.

In preparation for our next session, bring a book that is important to you; a book that the Priestess might hold in her hands.

This could be a book of poetry, a bible, dictionary, an art book, an encyclopedia…. whatever your drawn to place in the hands of the Priestess/Papesse.

Provocations

1 – In your lineage, what was not said? What was kept back — perhaps to protect, perhaps out of shame, perhaps because there were no words? What knowledge was withheld?

2 – Who was the keeper of secrets — not the gossip, but the holder of the family stories? The woman who knew more than she said. The elder who watched everything and revealed only what was needed. The one the family came to in crisis, and who somehow always knew what to do.

Did this person carry their knowledge lightly or heavily?
Was their wisdom respected, feared, diminished, or erased?
What of their knowing lives in you — acknowledged or unacknowledged?