The High Priestess.
Last year I did a project where I decided I needed to get to know the tarot on a different level. I slept with one card from Aleister Crowley and Lady Frida Harris’ Thoth Tarot underneath my pillow every night. Every morning, I would record the card, the phase of the moon and my dreams. That by itself is a whole story I will write about later, but needless to say, I had amazing and totally crazy results, and I had 78 nights of the most intense dreams I think I’ve ever had in my life. Then I decided to do it again.
The first time I did it in the order the tarot is normally laid out, starting from The Fool 0 and ending with the Princess of Disks. The second time I decided I would start with the cabalistic correspondences starting at the top, with the Aces in Kether. I worked my way down the tree on the Sephiroths going through each suit of the number as well as any Court cards that were applicable. Once in Malkuth, I worked my way back up the tree along the paths of the Majors, starting with the Universe card and then ending with The Fool.
Towards the end of this second round with only a few more left to go, it was the High Priestess’ turn. Just as I put her underneath my pillow and laid my head down, as clear as day, I heard a voice say, “I want you to paint me real.”
My eyes shot open. What? It repeated, “I want you to paint me real.” Okay.
And then she said, “Well, while you’re at it, just paint the whole thing too.”
I took “paint me real” to mean “paint me in the mische technique,” which is the old master’s style painting I paint in and to be sure, it’s hyper-realistic. It’s also unbelievably time-consuming. Then her last command of painting the “whole thing” could either mean all of the Major Arcana, or heaven forbid, the entire deck in the mische technique. Oh jeez. What did I just get myself into?
It was clear to me from the beginning that I had no choice in the matter. If I was to take anything seriously about the work and magic I had been doing with tarot, this was clearly a part of it and it had to be done. I began thinking about how I even felt using an existing piece of art in this way. The truth is I have the utmost respect and love for Lady Frida Harris and her work. In no way do I want to make it seem like I think I’m better than the originals or anything silly like that. It’s just the exact opposite. I want to do this because her images have meant so much to me, have lived in my psyche and my dreams and have become alive. It has been common practice in art institutions throughout history up until fairly recently to straight up copy the works of the masters to learn from their technique. There is artistic precedent for even that. But my project wouldn’t be copying her actual art at all but using her images as a springboard for my own expression of them. In a way, I can’t think of anything more reverent than that as an artist and that is the foundation I began planning my first piece with.
Obviously, the first painting had to be the High Priestess. She was abundantly clear in her commands that she wanted to be painted first and foremost. The rest of her companions was almost an afterthought. But how was I going to paint her? If she is “real” than she has to look like someone. I mulled over a few options but the more I thought about it, the more it began to take concrete shape. I decided to make the High Priestess a self-portrait. And as I began to work on her painting, I realized without a doubt that all of the rest of them need to be self-portraits too.
When you work with tarot, you put yourself into the cards; especially when you’re reading for yourself. Naturally then, when you’re reading for somebody else, that person becomes the cards. So the cards are shapeshifters to whomever it is they’re speaking to, manifesting as aspects of personality and Being that are both universal as archetypes and as specific as any individual. My High Priestess is different than your High Priestess but we can both agree that She has an overall meaning as well. The best way to speak to this was to have all of the Major Arcana have the same face, my face.
I want to talk a little bit about the High Priestess card in general. The high priestess is made of stone in this card. I like thinking of it as not just an earthly stone, but perhaps more like lunar rocks since she is the Moon. But even more than just because she is the Moon, she is out of reach for terrestrial concerns so she needs to be made out of something more otherworldly and out of reach, and frankly, something more magical than simply just marble. This lunar rock is very pristine, very clean, very pure, very hard, and very cold. She’s an austere queen; she sits on her high throne and kind of exists behind, not just the actual veil that’s in the painting, but even behind the mask that is her sculpture itself. So she’s not even a real, flesh and blood person here; she’s above and beyond that. She’s either entombed in this figure of her, or it’s just a representation of her form because her actual spirit is uncontainable. So she’s this cold, hard substance that’s sitting there in perfection as a representation of something as mutable as photons, sometimes focused like a laser and sometimes as ethereal as a rainbow.
The bow and arrow on her lap is the bow of Diana or Artemis. Just as Artemis, she’s a virgin priestess, not an archetypal mother goddess at all. She is not that kind of creative energy, but rather like pure wisdom – pure, like a pure inspiration that comes like a lightning bolt into your heart or into your mind. She is holding her arms in a gesture that creates a swirl of scintillating crystalline geometries much like the way the light plays in the inside of a crystal. Underneath is the bow of the moon, creating a horizon of light from which emanates the net of cosmic illusion. This is the veil of Maya, the separation between our egoic view of the world and the true nature of being beyond.
But I also like looking at it like it’s the matrix; the actual underlying structure of reality. She is behind and beyond that structure and from her emanates all of the things that this reality is made of. Her creative power, that clean sharp lightning of inspiration, becomes this network, this web, this structure that coalesces into the forms at the bottom of the painting. Representing the basic building blocks of reality, Crowley and Lady Harris came up with using seed pods and geometric forms. Each flower has ten petals for the ten Sephiroth on the Tree of Life, one having concave and receptive petals for Binah and the other spiral petals for Chokmah. The pine cone represents Bacchus and the grapes are for Dionysus as a nod to some knowledge and mystery traditions that are able to cut through the veil of illusion. The geometric forms are the Platonic solids, minus the cube. Platonic solids are constructed by shapes that are identical in shape and size meeting at regular angles with the same number of faces meeting at each vertex. Only five solids meet these criteria and four of them are represented in this painting. According to Plato, the classical elements were made of solids like these so it’s easy to see how they got included in this image. These forms along with the seeds and flowers are ideas of the beginning; the very kernel or nugget of something, the essence of something that’s going to become something else.
The camel, which may be one of my favorite parts, refers to the Hebrew letter Gimel, which is the G sound. The path that the High Priestess card is on the Tree of Life is called the path of Unifying Intelligence, path 13. It connects Kether and Tiphareth but has to cross over the Abyss to get from one to the other. Camels are the best creatures on the planet to have by your side when you are crossing the abyss of a desert. They are reliable, strong, steadfast, loyal, and those are kind of the qualities you need to get through the abyss. On the path from the sun to the essence of all being, you have to be steadfast; you have to be prepared; you have to be loyal. Think about a camel in a desert during a storm. You just have to put one foot in front of the other and keep going.
Camels naturally carry/conserve water and water, of course, is the element of the unconscious. The hidden meaning, in this case, is that to in order to be the Sun (Tiphareth) returning to the Father (Kether), you’ve got to resonate with your inner well (waters of the unconscious) and pass through the darkness in faith and meditation in order to immerge into the light. It’s almost like the infamous dark night of the soul experience in spirituality or meditative traditions, but coming totally prepared with your inner camel to carry you through at your darkest hour.
There is plenty more to say about the meaning of the card and many people have said much more. Perhaps as a few final thoughts, I’ll speak to what the High Priestess means to me.
I always think of that scene in The Lord of the Rings, where Galadriel tempts herself with the one ring. And she turns into a white, crystalline, terrifying goddess. And I feel like that’s exactly what the high priestess is. It’s sheer power, sheer entity, sheer destruction, sheer creative force that sometimes you can’t tell the difference between, that is so powerful, and so huge that we almost can’t comprehend it within our lives. But yet, we all carry that divine spark within us as well in the depths of our souls. She is the macrocosm as well as the microcosm, the ultimate pure light of spirit and the witchy way you feel on a good day. Personally, the High Priestess is an expression of me at my most empowered, most badass, strongest the-universe-is-my-playground Self. I pull this card and I know that today I can do anything. It’s when I’m in the flow of life when I feel most connected to the tendrils of the universe and everything I do ripples through reality and manifests.
I want to add that while I was painting this, I was learning about grimoires and journeying on Rune Soup’s Member courses. All of that information is baked into the brush strokes of this piece as well, which I find really appropriate.
Below are some of the underpainting initial steps of the Mische Technique. I love how the technique itself becomes opalescent which is so reminiscent of the crystalline nature of the High Priestess.
