Tarot Friday#3 – keeper of the secrets, "The High Priestess"

The mysterious „High Priestess“ is this weeks card in my presentation of the Tarot cards I painted back in the 1990s, as explained in my post about the Temple of the secrets

This is now the third chapter of our journey through a human life, commonly known as the „journey of the fool“. As you all know by now, the cards are metaphoric and don’t depict people or figures, as @animal-shelter describes so well in her inspiring and informative posts about the tarot cards.

Nevertheless, I like to see the cards as chapters in our own lives, as I find this easier to understand. Now, we have seen, how a soul manifested itself in our world, as „The Fool“ and got to the next two cards, which show us the „divine or spiritual parents“. „The Magician“ represented the „divine father“ and consequently, the „High Priestess“ represents the „spiritual or divine mother“, still an entity of a metaphysical world.

The colors give a first impression of the overall meaning, as in all of my 22 of the Major Arcana, the trump cards of the Tarot deck. With the Magician closely related to the energies of „yang“, the High Priestess holds the attributes of „yin“ and together with a mysterious darkness and the moon, I always felt a lot of water, like a deep ocean of (hidden) knowledge and intuition… and the use of deep blues combined with pale gold tones seemed the right choice for me.

On her head she is wearing the moon in three phases. Rising Moon represents the Virgin consecrated to the goddess. Full moon stands for the High Priestess as the representative of the goddess and the Decreasing moon shows her as the summoner of death.

Behind her, we see the pillars of Solomon's temple Boas and Jachin, symbols for positive and negative life force.

@animal-shelter gives an excellent and detailed interpretation of the meaning of the High Priestess, for those who'd like to read more about all the details.

If you are interested in the aspects of diviantion, please make sure to visit @mystikmoongypsy and @tarotbyfergus

For me, the High Priestess represents female energy, strong Intuition, your inner voice, knowledge of the right path, but there is also the element of her safeguarding a secret, hidden by the curtain behind her.

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In my Temple of the secrets, I created 66 large glass paintings in three rows. The middle row shows the trump cards of the Tarot, the Major Arcana. I just found a fragment I did for one of my early websites from the mid 1990s, which might give a better understanding of the structure of the whole artwork

As you can see, on the bottom level there is a (fictional) story, of how the cards came to us from ancient Egypt. The pictures of this story correspond to the theme of the card above, in this case the goddess Isis (with her husband Osiris), drawn with pencil on glass as the divine representation of the High Priestess.

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Temple of the secrets, total size of artwork is 15ft by 45ft, unfinished

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All photos/scans by me of my own artwork. The original cards are roughly 20"x40" and painted on glass in "Hinterglas" technique as described here