Writing Your Own Story with The High Priestess

Ah, friends, I am so excited to be seeing The High Priestess through my bleary eyes this morning. We haven’t been visited by this card in a long time. A perennial favorite of tarot readers, this Major Arcana powerhouse symbolizes the power of mystery, the energy of crossroads, and the meeting of intellect and intuition. To have them starting off our week shows a significant shift in our perceptions that’s worth noting, working with, and, ultimately, harnessing as we move forward.

Speaking of which, we ended last week with the ultimate card of moving forward, The Chariot. Take a moment to reflect on where yout felt compelled to take a first step in the past seven days. Honor your commitment to simply get moving, start a journey, and put yourself out into the world. I’m sensing a connection between these two cards, as if our gesture to embody the decisiveness of The Chariot has unearthed a long-buried truth about ourselves that’s now coming into focus via The High Priestess. Like any Major Arcana sequence, it may be somewhat intense - emotionally triggering, intimidating, or both. Yet this card’s presence shows us honing in on something vital and worth paying attention to: an enduring truth about ourself and our story.

We’ve been working with a lot of swords and cups cards lately, cards of transition and integration: The Five of Cups, Six of Swords, Four of Swords, and more. All of this has been co-occuring with a big focus on the earthy, practical pentacles. Taking care of our physical and material needs, in other words, has taken us on an emotional journey focused on learning how to care for ourselves and address long-simmering tensions around having, not having, and wanting more.

This week, however, The High Priestess arrives on the scene with a holistic, nuanced, and accurate understanding of our stories around work, resources, and personal value. I don’t usually make concrete suggestions in readings, but this one seems very clear: Like The High Priestess, we’re now holding an entire story about our experience. While they are inarguably a mystical figure, this card also touches on themes of intellectual knowledge, as symbolized by the scroll laying in their lap. This would be an excellent time to sit down and, with the knowledge you’ve fought for over the past few months, write out a narrative of your journey to uncover your relationship to material resources and how you structure your life. This could appear any number of ways, as: meditations on your career/calling, the healing work you’ve done around resources - abundance and/or scarcity, and how you spend your time to sustain a life that’s meaningful to you. This week gives us a rare opportunity for clarity and focus. We’ve reached an important place, a moment of knowing, let’s take advantage of it.

The High Priestess is a deeply introspective card. You may feel a call to go inward, detach from distraction and striving, or even take physial space away from your daily life. Honor this call, though it may be in conflict with your actual demands as the Ten of Wands shows us at a moment of busyness and, most likely, overwhelm. All tens are the end of a cycle, so know that this is very much a temporary situation. And, in fact, frustration is a helpful teacher this week. If The High Priestess is the simplicity of knowing the truth, the Knight of Swords is the part of ourselves that rises up to cull burdens, tasks, and distractions that keep us from that truth. I have to say I’m very happy to have this Knight return playing a positive role in our reading. This week honor your frustration, impatience, and inability to suffer fools. You don’t have to go around lopping heads off, but do take these prickly feelings as instructions for where to cut mindfully, one your temper has cooled.

The Knight of Swords rushes towards The High Priestess, telling us that these emotions bring us back to the enduring truth. I love how this powerful archetype is seated, still and serene, between two black and white pillars. They inhabit the spaces in between, calmly resisting the pull of black-and-white thinking, the seduction of binaries, and the creative death of assuming things have to be one particular way. The tapestry behind them is bursting with lush palm fronds and pomegranates. The rich beauty of real life is between either/or, right-and-wrong, this-and-that. Think of how youv’e been practicing inhabiting this abundant and wild place. How you’ve been prioritizing not knowing everything, experiencing each moment as it unfolds, and taking power from the mysteries of life. If anything in your daily life isn’t supporting this worldview or has simply become an annoying distraction from what matters, now is the time to say goodbye.

This week is about noticing these places - seeing what in the daily burdens shown in the Ten of Wands is holding you back - by embracing the frustration and impatience of the Knight of Swords. Swords are about noticing, identifying, understanding. This is our task this week. We don’t have to act just yet (and the Ten of Wands is also the natural conclusion of a cycle - some things will shed of their own accord, too) but we can pay attention to and respect where we’re just not feeling it anymore, and, in fact, do feel a sense of annoyance, as if we’ve outgrown something and can no longer ignore the discomfort.

The High Priestess is a spiritually powerful card. It seems like our intellect is very active and aware (hello, Knight of Swords), but do make room to hear your spiritual/intuitive voice and hold it in equal regard. Dreams, synchronicities, meditation, and journaling will all hold powerful clues for this moment.

And, again, I can’t help but think that writing - not necessarily in a straightforward way! get creative! - will help commemorate and deepen our experience of this card. How can you narrate the past few months in a mythic way? See your trials and growth as part of a fairytale, thus opening up new insights and a more profound respect for your path?