The High Priestess

The second trump was called La Papesse, the female pope, and it is the most historically loaded card in the deck. A female pope in a fifteenth-century Italian card game is not a neutral image. Two explanations circulate and neither is settled.

The first is the legend of Pope Joan, the woman who according to a widely repeated medieval story concealed her sex and reigned as pope. The story is not historically true, but it was believed and depicted, and a card-maker could reasonably have expected players to recognise it.

The second is more specific and more interesting. Sister Manfreda was a member of the Guglielmite sect in Milan, elected by them as pope, and burned as a heretic in 1300. She was a relative of the Visconti family, for whom the oldest surviving tarot decks were painted. The suggestion that the Visconti-Sforza card commemorates her is attractive and has been made repeatedly, but the identification rests on inference rather than on any inscription or document. It should be treated as a serious hypothesis, not a fact.

The card was contentious enough that some later printings dodged it. In the Besancon variant of the French pattern the second trump is renamed Junon and given a peacock, and the fifth trump becomes Jupiter, replacing two Catholic offices with Roman gods, a Protestant tidying-up rather than an occult one. Waite's rechristening of her as the High Priestess, with Isis and the veil of the Temple behind it, belongs to a different project again: an attempt to make the card mean something universal rather than something local and awkward.

The occult reading of this card was assembled in the nineteenth century out of material the fifteenth century did not have. The Golden Dawn gave the second trump the letter Gimel, the Moon, and the thirteenth path of the Tree of Life, the long central path from Kether to Tiphareth that crosses the Abyss. That is a striking and coherent assignment, and it is barely more than a century old.

Waite layers on top of it a set of identifications drawn from his own reading: the pillars of Solomon's Temple, the Shekinah, Isis, and the scroll of a hidden law. Crowley extends the same line into the Priestess as the highest and least approachable of the feminine figures in the deck. What all of these share is an idea of the card as knowledge that is present but withheld, and it is that idea, rather than any medieval one, that most readers today are actually working with.

The reading range is correspondingly narrow and unusually consistent. The card is taken for intuition, latent or unspoken knowledge, patience with what has not yet been said, and the correctness of not forcing an answer. Where readers differ is in tone: some read it as an instruction to trust an inner sense, others more coolly as a statement that the information required is simply not yet available and no amount of interpretive effort will produce it.

Reversed, Waite-derived practice reads secrecy turned unhealthy, self-deception, or knowledge withheld to control. Readers who do not use reversals reach much the same territory by noting which cards fall beside her.

The deck that taught most living readers what the cards look like was drawn by a woman whose name was left off it for most of a century, and the record is worth stating plainly.

Pamela Colman Smith was an artist, illustrator and theatrical designer, born in London and raised partly in Jamaica, who was working in the same occult circles as Arthur Edward Waite when he engaged her to produce a tarot. The deck appeared in December 1909, published by William Rider and Son. Waite supplied direction and a companion text; Smith drew all seventy-eight cards, including the fifty-six minor cards which she had to invent from almost nothing, since no widely available deck before hers gave the pips full scenes.

For decades the deck was called the Rider-Waite, naming the publisher and the author and omitting the artist. The name Rider-Waite-Smith, now standard in careful usage, is a comparatively recent correction, and the scholarship recovering Smith's life and work, most substantially the volume assembled by Stuart Kaplan and his collaborators and published in 2018, is more recent still.

The correction matters interpretively and not only ethically. A very large proportion of what readers take to be the meaning of a card is in fact a decision Smith made at her drawing board in 1909: a gesture, a background, a figure looking one way rather than another. Attributing those decisions to Waite, or to tradition, or to antiquity, misdescribes where the meaning came from. She made it up, and she made it up well.