The High Priestess
Trump II of the tarot: a woman enthroned between two pillars. Older decks called her the Papess, the female pope.
Meaning
In Waite's card she sits between the white and black pillars of the Temple, marked J and B, with a horned crown on her head, a scroll marked Tora in her hands and the crescent moon at her feet. Waite called her "the Secret Tradition". Older names for the card were the Pope Joan and the Female Pontiff.
Waite's meanings
Waite gave the card "secrets, mystery, the future as yet unrevealed", and also "silence, tenacity; mystery, wisdom, science"; reversed, "passion, moral or physical ardour, conceit, surface knowledge".
In older decks
A nineteenth-century Milanese pack in the British Museum names the card La Papessa. Papus joined it to the second Hebrew letter, Beth.
See also
The Hierophant, Boaz and Jachin, The Fool, The Magician, The Empress, The Emperor.
Sources
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A. E. Waite, William Rider & Son, London, 1910 (the sacred-texts.com transcription, on the Internet Archive), The Trumps Major; The Greater Arcana and their Divinatory Meanings
- The Tarot of the Bohemians, by Papus, Chapman & Hall, London, 1896, translated by A. P. Morton (scan on the Internet Archive), The Symbolical Tarot
- A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and Other Cards in the British Museum, by W. H. Willshire, Trustees of the British Museum, London, 1876 (scan on the Internet Archive), Italian tarots, second quarter of the nineteenth century, Milan
Last reviewed September 27, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research