Tarot · Major Arcana
The High Priestess
Key II - Water
Correspondences
- Element
- Water
- Planet
- Moon
- Sign
- Cancer
- Number
- 2
- Yes / no
- Maybe upright, No reversed
Traditional Golden Dawn attributions. The yes / no value is a convention for single-card questions, not a prediction.
Upright
An answer is already known to you beneath the surface of conscious thought.
The High Priestess. An answer is already known to you beneath the surface of conscious thought. Second: the counterweight to the Magician. What is known without being spoken, and what is spoiled by being forced into words too early. Under the Moon, it works in cycles and reflections: mood, memory, and matters that change shape depending on when you look at them. Being Water, it resolves below the surface, on feeling rather than argument. Its keyword range runs through intuition, the subconscious, hidden knowledge, stillness, and the inner voice.
Reversed
A truth is being ignored, or a voice within has gone quiet from disuse.
The High Priestess reversed. A truth is being ignored, or a voice within has gone quiet from disuse. Its sign is Cancer, which protects: the shell around the soft thing, loyalty to one's own, and a memory that does not let go easily. Reversed here, it has turned inward: felt privately, withheld, or held so tightly that nobody around you knows it is happening. Its keyword range, to be read here as difficulty, delay, or a lesson not yet learned: withheld secrets, disconnection from intuition, surface-level understanding, silence, and repressed insight.
About the Tarot
A 15th-century Italian card game that was turned to fortune-telling only 350 years later.
The upright and reversed meanings here follow the mainstream Rider-Waite-Smith reading tradition. A reversed card is treated as the same force blocked, turned inward, or overexpressed - not simply as its opposite.
Full history →Meanings are a guide to a symbolic tradition, offered for reflection and entertainment. They do not predict the future or describe real people or events. See the Terms.