The High Priestess' Secret

In examining The Fool and The Magus, we've introduced the concept of three Paths simultaneously emanating from Kether's appearance. One of these is The High Priestess, which is the first Path on the Tree of Life to connect the Supernal Triad (Kether, Chockmah, Binah) to the Sephiroth below and the only direct Path between Kether and the lower Tree. This journey traverses The Abyss that separates Modes of Consciousness accessible to humans from those purely theoretical; the Veil of Maya.

The High Priestess is also the first Trump to depict a gendered form. Here is Divine Feminine Intuition. The Hebrew letter assigned to the card, Gimel, translates to "Camel," the pack animal capable of traveling the desert with cargo intact. Here, more than anywhere on The Tree, lie The Great Mysteries of Life and Death; here is where The Seeker of Knowledge meets She Who Knows That Which Never Is Known.

The Magus Speaks

The Fool of Tarot has been introduced as the Main Player upon the stage of The World, the One (or None) beneath the disguise that is every other human form of the Major Arcana. Travelling through the cards "in order," the first of these Masqueraders we meet is The Magus (or Magician, or Juggler.)

To properly understand this Trump, we will first need to investigate The Tree of Life (or Otz Chim) of Qabalah, which fully incorporates and organizes the subsets of symbols necessary to our aims. Next, language itself must be considered. Many occultists regard the spoken/written Word as one of only two forms of true magick available to human beings, the other being sexual energy, of course.

The Fool of the Abyss

When I walk by neon PSYCHIC READINGS signs, I think, "If the person opens the door and motions like they've been expecting me, then I'll go inside."

So, I've never seen a fortune teller.

Divination in general seems rather silly, whether derived from so-called astrology, numerology, palm reading, Tarot or whatever-else-have-you. Mind you, this isn't to say that these organizational systems are without merit, because some of them are quite useful when not profaned by cold reading con artists in the role of spiritual guide to the lonely and gullible of Earth.

Whether you believe Consciousness to be the primum mobile of existence or the culmination to-date of Evolutionary process, the inherent link between Mind and Matter seems stupefyingly obvious. Therefore, the notion of a Secret Language of Consciousness, or Logos, behind the veil of Maya, or buried in the genetic code of the species, is not so outrageous.

Adepts of Hermetic Qabalah and its countless bastard children propose to have stumbled upon The Lexicon of such a pictorial language in Tarot: that pre-Jungian blueprint of the House of Consciousness which incorporates the symbology of The Zodiac, numerology and the Tree of Life, built by a hand seemingly extraterrestrial/superhuman in skill, ostensibly with no greater purpose than to play a little game...