The Veracity of Our Intuition: The High Priestess in the Tarot

(Based on the representations found on the Rider-Waite-Smith deck.)

Intuition. This is the word most often associated with the High Priestess. It seems almost paradoxical: we turn to the Tarot for oracular guidance, but, in pulling this card, the seer from whom we seek answers asks us to find them within ourselves.

Oracles, like the famous one at Delphi, peppered the ancient world. From Egypt to Assyria to Greece and beyond, these channelers appeared to share some characteristics in common: first, their methods entailed entering states of “raptured frenzy,” suggesting that these prophetic rituals were often wildly uncontrolled, and second, these oracles were almost always women. In the case of Delphi, the oracle’s prognostications not only required translation by a priest, but, according to William J. Broad, petitioners had to put their questions through these male intermediaries as well. Seldom, if at all, were female querents permitted to engage the oracle directly, despite the fact that the oracle was composed of women, who passed their methods down from one generation to the next (Ancient Delphi and the Science Behind its Lost Secrets, 13). Within the highly chauvinistic ancient Greek society, Broad writes, “the jarring contradiction — suitable for any number of psychoanalytic studies — is that the greatest authority in ancient Greece was a woman” (13).

In contrast to the Hierophant whose depiction appears more “institutional” than mystical, the High…