HIGH PRIESTESS - Worry about Nothing, Pray About Everything
A Tarot offering for the ebbing tide of Cancer season
As a child I was taught to pray. We said a family blessing before our evening meal. God is great, good is good. And we thank him for our food. Before bed, my brother and I recited the protective incantation: If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Such a morbid little rhyme to comfort a child. But I relied on these nightly prayers almost instinctually—releasing my childhood fears into each sing-song syllable before drifting off to sleep.
In one of my earliest memories, I wake in the night at my grandparents’ house. Alone in my father’s old bedroom, narrow wood-paneled walls press in on me with unfamiliar shadows. The recessed bookshelf becomes a gaping maw, its row of spines gritting together like jagged teeth. I am too young to know if my sleeping grandparents will hear me cry out. Too afraid to crawl from the covers and seek them out across the hall.
I know no prayers to address this kind of fear. I tense my tiny muscles against the panic and begin some kind of wordless supplication to Spirit instead, a silent please, please, please, God!
I remember this so clearly: the sense of a warm, loving presence coming into the room. Darkness softening from void to velvet. Then the weight of an over-sized hand cupping my shoulder with gentle reassurance.
Warmth spreads from the press of that invisible palm all through my body, filling the hollows of my chest, spreading to the tips of my fingers. I release my grip on the blanket’s edge. My heartbeat slows. Breath deepens. I fall asleep in the tangible presence of something I can’t name, but which I recognize so fully that on waking I don’t even think to mention it to my family.
The Unintentional Secret
In fact, I never tell anyone about this Visitation, thinking it was lovely, yes, but also—just not that big of a deal. As children we are confronted with so many new experiences and this one was simply integrated among infinite other unknowns into my young life.
And yet, I have kept this memory through all the intervening years. Growing up I would recall it fondly with a resurgence of that inner warmth. I never questioned it. I never made it special. I just liked remembering the sensation of be surrounded with all that love. It wasn’t until adulthood that my feelings about that night shifted. It seemed a little weird. I marveled at the capacity of my childhood imagination. How could my mind conjure something so vivid, so wholly palpable? An illusion that felt real.
In midlfe, the illusion has begun to crack open into a new kind of truth. I have become willing to believe in the possibility that my experience that night reflects an ongoing call and response between myself and something…something…else? Beyond me and my senses?
Or something deeper within?
I don’t know. Again—there are no words.
But in the absence of language for this spiritual exchange—the Tarot has given me the HIGH PRIESTESS. I think of the warmth of that hand on my shoulder when I pull this card. I suspect that I align with the HIGH PRIESTESS when I pray, like a child, for someone to be with me, in my distress, in my triumphs, or just in moments when I need to know I’m not alone.
And the difficulty of this card is that Spirit doesn’t always answer with the obvious pressure of a hand on my shoulder. In my experience the deep intuitive connection that the HIGH PRIESTESS embodies most often arrives quietly. Gently. Not because she’s so far away, but because Spirit, in its every-day form, is so common as to be easily overlooked.
Like a lot of us, I try to turn up the volume with extremes: hallucinogenics, demanding spiritual practices, pilgrimages that lead me far away from day-to-day mundanities.
These extremes aren’t necessary.
Any child waking in the night and calling out for comfort can tell you how it works—you just ask.
You just ask Spirit to be with you and overtime you’ll start to remember that She’s already here. Inside you. Above you. Holding you. Wherever you can imagine her? That’s where She is.
I know that there are a lot of studies out there about prayer, about how it works (or doesn’t) about it’s relationship to our nervous system and its functionality in supporting mental and physical health over time. The hosts of This Jungian Life recently pointed out that the practice of prayer is consistent throughout history and across cultures—suggesting that if it had no worth (evolutionarily) “prayer” would never have maintained its universal cultural significance.
Yet, as wide-reaching as the impulse to pray is, there are more ways to practice it than there are people on the planet. Even a single person contains multitudes. Our methods of prayer can shift and change over time. Kneeling in church when we are young, hiking by a mountain stream when we are older. Meditating or journaling. Sitting with Tarot cards. The sky is not even the limit.
These days, I’m finding it helpful to seek Spirit in my own body. My prayers look like this: I bring my awareness to the center of my chest. I breathe into that place. I feel the strength my solar plexus holding my heart aloft. I don’t use words. I just let myself feel my silent longing for Spirit’s support. And she’s here.
There is more to this story.
As often happens in HIGH PRIESTESS territory, the threads of the tapestry spread out. I’m learning something about how far the lines of this pattern expand and I want to try and covey it, but the story is so big.
It has something to do with the distance I feel as a Tarot practitioner and a witch from my childhood upbringing in the Lutheran Church. It’s a distance that is underscored in relationships with my brother and sister, who are deeply devoted to their identities as Christians, in a way that I sometimes feel divides us.
But listen to this: On a recent visit to the midwest, my sister invited me to attend her church for the first time. My brother-in-law led the service as my sister held congregants in prayer. It wasn’t perfect for me. There were scriptures that spoke of sin and made my stomach drop with sorrow. I just can’t believe in a cosmology that heaps blame upon any human’s narrow shoulders, when we’re all here just trying to survive. But then my brother-in-law shared a story about my sister. About how she woke in the night from a terrible dream that had her shaking with fear. Unable to sleep, she left her bed to pray in the living room and experienced: love in the room. The physical sensation of hands on her shoulders. Warmth. Peace in her heart.
From the pew, my heart stuttered and ached with affection. I came to the quiet realization: There are sacred rooms inside the temple of my sister’s faith that I will never enter—whether by choice or expulsion—but still, she and I are somehow talking to the same God. And, despite our differences, I can see the HIGH PRIESTESS in her as she wraps her arms around the members of her family church to pray over them. How can I do anything but appreciate the Spirit that animates this all?
What I hope you take from this synchronistic expansion of my HIGH PRIESTESS story is reassurance that wherever and however YOU find it easiest to communicate with Spirit, that practice is legitimate. Members of our monthly Tarot Circle mentioned experiencing divine communion in activities like: looking at the stars, reading good books, being out in nature. Done with awareness it all becomes sacred—a place to commune with Spirit and receive the balm of her presence. These experiences revive the mystery of what it means to be human. And so they belong to us all.
Try this:
Pull a card for each of the following questions to connect with the HIGH PRIESTESS right now!
How can I align with the HIGH PRIESTESS in me?
What does the HIGH PRIESTESS want me to know?
Where can I relax my grip and let Spirit ease my fears?
How to work with me this summer—
Come to Tarot Circle! Follow Arcana Craft on MeetUp for announcements about FREE monthly Tarot Circle hosted by the Healing Temple ATX, as well as periodic online offerings on special topics.
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What a beautiful story about the almost "shared" mystical goddess visits of yourself and your sister. You are on my calendar - finally - look forward to seeing you and everyone next Monday nite.