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The High Priestess ~ symbolic meanings painted in the card.

The card of the High Priestess portrays a slender, ethereal young woman with pale skin, long black hair and dark eyes, dressed in a simple white gown. On her head is a golden crown. In her right hand she holds a pomegranate, split open to show its multitude of seeds. In her left hand a bunch of white narcissi trail to the ground. On either side of the stairway on which she stands is a pillar; the left one is black, the right one white. Behind her, at the top of the staircase, a doorway opens out on to the rich green landscape which appears in the card of the Empress.

The pomegranate is both the fruit of the dead and of conjugal love because of its many seeds. Thus Persephone’s hidden world is fertile and full of undeveloped creative potential.

The black and white pillars reflect the duality contained in the underworld. Both creative potentials and destructive impulses are hidden in the darkness of the unconscious.

The narcissus, which Persephone picked when Hades abducted her, was associated with the dead because of its ghostly colour and its annual emergence from the winter earth.

Major Arcana ~ The High Priestess

Here we meet Persephone, queen of the underworld, daughter of the Earth Mother Demeter and guardian of the secrets of the dead. We have already seen, in the card of the Empress, how, according to the myth, Hades, lord of the underworld, was overwhelmed with desire for the maiden while she wandered in the fields picking flowers, and rose up out of the earth to abduct her. When he had brought her to his dark abode, he offered her a pomegranate, which she ate. Having partaken of the fruit of the dead, she was thus bound to him forever.

Persephone ruled over the underworld with her husband for three months of the year. Although the remaining nine months were spent in the daylight world with her mother Demeter, she could never speak of the secrets she had learned in the land of the dead. The realm of Hades, full of mysteries and riches, was ringed round by the terrible river Styx, over which no living man or woman could cross without the permission of Hades himself; although Hermes, messenger of the gods and guide of souls, could usher through those exceptional heroes who had gained the god’s consent. Even the souls of the dead could not cross without paying a coin to Charon, the old ferryman who rowed the boat of passage across the Styx, for at the gateway to Hades’ realm crouched the terrifying three-headed dog Cerberus who devoured any trespasser, living or dead, who did not respect the laws of the invisible realm. Thus, through eating the pomegranate, Persephone left behind her innocent girlhood, and became the guardian of this shadowy realm and custodian of its secrets.

On an inner level, Persephone, the High Priestess, is an image of the link with that mysterious inner world to which depth psychology has given the name ‘the unconscious’. It is as though, beneath and beyond the ordinary daylight world which we believe to be reality, lies another, hidden world, full of riches and potentials, which we cannot penetrate without the consent of its invisible rulers. This world contains our undeveloped potentials as well as the darker, more primitive facets of the personality. It also holds the secret of the destiny of the individual, which gestates in darkness until the time is ripe for manifestation. Persephone, the High Priestess, is an embodiment of that part of us which knows the secrets of the inner world. But she can only be dimly sensed by waking consciousness, and appears through the fleeting fragments of dreams, or through those strange coincidences which make us begin to wonder whether there might be some hidden pattern at work in our lives.

Persephone is a seductive and fascinating figure, but she does not speak of her secrets. In the same way the night-world of the unconscious, glimpsed through dreams and fantasies and intuitions, is also seductive and fascinating, but when we try to grasp it with the intellect and ‘master’ it for our own purposes, it remains mute and slides away. The dark world of Persephone provides only shadowy glimpses of patterns and movements at work within the individual, which require patience and the passage of time before they can be brought into the light of day. The myth of Persephone emphasizes the cyclical motion of time, portraying a mysterious rhythm, a constant coming and going of something. The seeds of change and new potentials wait silently in the womb of the underworld before they are given over to the care of the Earth Mother and brought to birth in the material world.

Persephone, the High Priestess, is an image of that natural law at work within the depths of the soul which governs the unfoldment of destiny from an invisible source, and which is revealed only through feeling, intuition and the night-world of dreams.

On a divinatory level, the appearance of the High Priestess in a spread augurs the heightening of the powers of intuition, and implies that there will be an encounter of some kind with the hidden inner world which Persephone rules. The individual may be drawn inexplicably to this world through an interest in the occult or the esoteric, or through the effects of a powerful dream or the uncanny sense that ‘something’ is at work in one’s life.

Thus the Fool, having learned something of his physical nature and needs and his place in the world through his earthly parents, the Empress and the Emperor, now enters the night-world, and comes, often with confusion and bewilderment, to that silent figure who embodies Mother on another, deeper and subtler level - the womb of the unconscious in which the secret of his real purpose and the pattern of his destiny are contained.

I will explain in my readings what each card means, this is a general interpritation taken from the Mythic Tarot Deck

Information Source: Mythic Tarot Deck
[published in 1986 by Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene and Illustrated by Tricia Newell (not the New Mythic Tarot)]