The High Priestess Tarot Meaning: What Waite Actually Wrote

The High Priestess is card II of the Major Arcana, and in the Rider–Waite–Smith tarot, published in 1909, she is one of its most enigmatic images. The deck was designed by the occultist A. E. Waite and painted by the artist Pamela Colman Smith, and Waite explained the card himself in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910).

The image

The High Priestess sits between two pillars, one dark and one light, marked B and J: Boaz and Jachin, the pillars of Solomon's Temple. Behind her hangs a veil decorated with pomegranates. She holds a scroll marked TORA, partly hidden by her mantle, wears a crown shaped like the phases of the moon, and has a crescent moon at her feet.

What Waite wrote

In The Pictorial Key, Waite associated the upright card with secrets, mystery, the future as yet unrevealed, silence and wisdom. For the reversed card he gave a list including passion, moral or physical ardour, conceit and surface knowledge. Many modern books offer different reversed meanings; those are later interpretations, not Waite's.

Symbols of hidden knowledge

The card's imagery is about what is held back: the veil, the half-hidden scroll and the threshold between the two pillars. That is why the High Priestess is so often read as intuition and inner knowledge.

The High Priestess in jewellery

A High Priestess design references tarot, the Waite–Smith deck and the idea of hidden wisdom. Take a look at the AURYN High Priestess charm, or read about the Shem ha-Mephorash, another subject of Western esoteric tradition.