Tarot Card meaning for the High Priestess

We see a young woman in a beautiful flowing dress. The High Priestess is the first female in the deck. From this point onwards there is the concept of duality. There is male and female, black and white, light and dark.
This card represents more of the inner world, which consists of feelings and intuition. This is indicated by the flowing dress and the water at her feet as well as the water behind her. Water symbolises both emotions and intuition, it is the intangible yet tangible.

Through the intuition she holds the somewhat hidden knowledge about life. The card urges you to listen to your gut feeling, you know what you want – deep down. Are you honest and brave enough to follow your inner ‘guide’ your intuition even though things do not make sense to the logical mind?

The High Priestess as a day card

Today, listen to your intuition, give-in to your gut feeling – what does or doesn’t feel right? If you haven’t been listening to your intuitions, think about why that might be? Take time to think about these feelings. Sometimes we come up with the most creative and wonderful ideas if we let our unconscious take over for a bit.

Negative or Reversed meaning for this card

Being on the darker side of intuition we might question; are you telling hunches to help or hinder? Being too much in the emotions can mean the High Priestess can easily fall into moods, possibly depression.
We can also get too caught up in intuition; things need to feel 100% right all of the time. This means we haven’t got the right balance, between the rational mind and our intuition / hunches.

How this card could present itself in real life

I have had a number of times that logically things all seemed okay but my gut feeling was telling me things were wrong. Examples that come to mind are business undertakings that have proven very costly and I ‘knew it’ because I had this feeling about it from the start. We sometimes ignore our intuition and later on understand what it was trying to tell us. It is okay, we will learn (allot) from it and maybe next time we can trust our intuition a bit more.

How this card is represented in other tarot decks

The High Priestess is almost always a female dressed in a wonderful gown. There is something dreamy, magical and mystical about her which is exactly what she stands for. You can understand her but to put it into logical words somehow seems not sufficient. It is in most decks one of the most beautiful cards as creativity can take over here.

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