The High Priestess.
The scroll out, and not open.
Upright, then reversed, as Waite gave them in 1910.
She sits between a black pillar and a white one, a veil of pomegranates behind her. A scroll rests in her lap with TORA on it, half of it inside her robe. A crescent moon lies at her feet and her robe runs over it like water.
What is known here is not being refused. She is between the two pillars instead of at either, and the scroll is out and not open. What you want to know is out, half visible, and in reach. Nobody has been asked.
Four things people go to on this card
- the scroll
You went to the scroll. It says TORA and most of it is inside her robe.
Knowledge that is present and is not being handed over. She is not hiding it as a trick; she is holding it, part of it showing, and waiting.
If something is being kept from you at the moment, the card's suggestion is that it is not being kept so much as not yet asked for. Work out what you already half know. Then work out who could confirm it in one sentence, and why you have not put the question to them.
What do you already half know that you have not asked anybody to confirm?
- the pillars
The pillars took you: one black, one white, lettered B and J, and she is sitting exactly between them.
A position taken between two absolutes rather than on one of them. These are the two pillars of the temple and the seat is in the gap, which is the only place in the picture that belongs to nobody.
Take that as instruction rather than description. Where you are being pushed to be on one side, this card draws somebody whose whole authority comes from the middle, and who is not there because she could not decide. She is there because that is where the scroll is kept.
Where are you being pushed to take a side when the useful position is between them?
- the veil
You looked past her at the curtain. Pomegranates and palms, and it is what stops you seeing further in.
The difference between a secret and a threshold. Nothing behind the cloth is being withheld from you personally. There is a next room and you are not in it, and the cloth is where those two facts meet.
So the useful question is not what is hidden. It is what you would have to become to be someone who goes through, and that is always slower and duller than finding out. Nobody is going to describe the room to you. The card is clear that description would not help.
What would you have to become to be let into this, rather than told about it?
- the crescent
Your eye went down to the moon at her feet, lying on the floor with her robe running over it.
A cycle underfoot instead of overhead. She is not watching it and not consulting it. She has it, and she is sitting on top of it, which is what having been through something several times looks like.
If you are in a phase of something, the card is unbothered, because phases come round. What it asks is whether you have started treating the current stretch as the permanent condition, and whether you would still be making this decision if you remembered the last time.
What are you treating as permanent that is actually a phase you have been through before?
On the Tree of Life, The High Priestess is the thirteenth path, Gimel, from Kether to Tiphareth, in the Golden Dawn's attribution (Liber 777).
Draw a card, and if this one turns, press whichever of these four you went to and the reading is written from there instead. Pulled it in a spread of your own? Read the whole spread here.