Tarot: The Priestess // Intuition & Intelligence

Pssst! Lower your voice. Take a deep breath. The HIGH PRIESTESS is welcoming you to her Sanctuary. Get yourself ready to turn inward, to listen to your INTUITION, and realign with your highest PURPOSE. 

But let’s have a look at the setting first. Once you dare to lift your gaze, you’ll see a woman sitting on a throne cloaked in a wide, night blue garment. THE PRIESTESS is wearing a tiara, indicating that she is drawing her power not from the sphere of the mundane but instead from the realm of the SACRED. O yes! Sacred is a huge word! But thank Goddess, Casper ter Kuile is offering us a very tangible definition that drags the SACRED out of the shadowy territory of the “religious” and into our daily life. In his wonderful book The Power of the Ritual he describes the SACRED as a very accessible layer of MEANING:

“Imagine there’s a horizontal line between the shallow and the deep. It stretches across every place and every person. When we can sink below the blur of habit, we can be present to that portion of experience where we find deepest meaning, [the sacred]. When we look at the world that way, any place, and any time can be sacred." *2)

The HIGH PRIESTESS is inviting you to DEEP DIVE into the sacred sphere where you’ll find HIGH PURPOSE, DEEP JOY, and a LASTING SENSE of MEANING and BELONGING. 

COMMIT & CONNECT! 

Alright, sinking in and raising the treasures… Is it that easy? “Yes and No.”, the HIGH PRIESTESS says with an enigmatic smile. This is a good moment to remember that the major arcana are being called “MAJOR” because they deal with major questions or developmental tasks. And as a first lesson the HIGH PRIESTESS teaches us that on every threshold there’s something we must SACRIFICE. 

And to enter HER Temple, we must leave behind our collective obsession with the rational, the predictable, and calculable – qualities that our capitalistic western society holds in high esteem since they are associated with safety and control. Get yourself ready for a true PARADIGM SHIFT: To hear and use your INTUITIVE RESPONSES you must first acknowledge the SUBCONSCIOUS as the well of your most ingenious ideas, your most clairvoyant forebodings, and most reliable presentiments. It means that you must excavate a set of resources that have been systematically dismissed as hysterical, lunatic, sinister or even dangerous for more than two centuries. 

That's why reconnecting to your inner HIGH PRIESTESS today is both an act of deep DEVOTION and a courageous act of REBELLION. 

INTO INTUITION

Let’s look at INTUITION and understand why it might be worthwhile to take this risk. Even though I’m not a big admirer of Steve Jobs and am unsure about the blessings of his highly seductive products there is this quote on INTUITION that I really like. 

Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Steve Jobs

I think tat there lies a lot of wisdom in this small word TRULY. Jobs – whom we admire as a great thinker and strategist - acknowledges the existence of an inner authority that has a more precise knowledge than our highly estimated minds. Study after study demonstrates that intuitive decisions make us much happier than rational considerations. Your INTUITION is a personal compass calibrated on what is most important to you. It points to your TRUE VALUES. These are not the values you pick as a pretty decoration for you application. Instead, they are your inherent, life lasting desires and motivations that may differ significantly from outer standards. 

The HIGH PRIESTESS knows that what you TRULY want may not be what you think you want. What you TRULY want may not be what your bank account wants. What your parents or your spouse want. What your ambition or your anger want. What society or your clients want.

BANKER to BAKER

When people start to listen to their INNER GUIDANCE, we see them make sharp and surprising turnarounds. Often our childhood fantasies and favorite pastimes are a very good indicator. One of my favorite examples is Seri, a former banker who quit his job to become a baker, whose breads are famous in Zurich today. 

The HIGH PRIESTESS is both demanding and strengthening your INTEGRITY. She will prevent you from trading your deep desires for quick wins. Her rigidity and purity make her the perfect custodian of your values and happiness.

It may be a clever step, but it won’t make SENSE for you. It may seem lucrative, but it won’t make you HAPPY, dear. The High Priestess

The HIGH PRIESTESS is quick to purify our cloudy mixture of VOCATION and CAREER. Job ladders crack under her gaze. The BLUE LADY thinks in cycles. Her plans for you do not cover the upcoming business year, but the span of a life. Your life, to be exact. 

BIG DREAMS & SMALL STEPS

Despite her introversive nature the HIGH PRIESTESS is activity oriented. Our INTUITION is not a dreamy something but our most efficient tool for complex situations and tough DECISIONS. It is directed towards ALIGNMENT. Everyone who’s ever visited a yoga class heard the word “alignment”. It is an important yogic principle and means, for instance, to connect breath and movement: “Inhale, lift your arms. Exhale, lower your shoulders.” 

Now scale this up. The HIGH PRIESTESS wants you to firmly connect your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, posture, words, actions, mood, and gifts. If this seems too much, start small: Believe what you sense. Say what you feel. Do what you think. Show what you can. 

In our daily life such wholehearted moves are significant and rare. We all know that it is so terribly easy to evade, to procrastinate or to sidestep our intuitive insights. But this is no problem. In the eyes of the HIGH PRIESTESS there is no failure. Only something you had to learn or heal on a supposed “detour”. 

Alright then. Close this tab! Sink in silence. Commit, connect & concentrate.

I promise, the High Priestess is on your side!

Yours, INSA

PS: The Priestess and me 

Obviously, this BLOG in and of itself is a HIGH-PRIESTLY endeavor. And so far, it is my deepest and most courageous commitment to what I TRULY want to be. In fact, while I am writing this text, I am permanently worried what possible readers and clients might think of me.

The HIGH PRIESTESS was my patron and teacher during the years I spent in my Alpine retreat. In order to find out, what I truly want I had to spend a lot more time alone than most people ever do. The solitude was a bitter and much needed medicine to come to terms with my extremely high receptiveness.

When it comes to feeling it all I am a natural. But when it comes to boundary setting, I am terribly slow on the uptake. For many years I had only two modalities at my disposal: A complete openness with a strong tendency to martyrdom on the one hand and a total and irreversible retreat one the other hand. 

Only in safe distance to other people’s opinions, expectations and standards was I able to slowly tune into myself and reconnect to the essentials of my existence. It took me years to find out that I TRULY love to access the UNCONSCIOUS by reading the cards. I TRULY love to offer consolation by talking about the cycle of life and the cycles of the planets. I TRULY love to give classes on INTUITION, BELONGING, EMOTIONS and ALIGNMENT. I TRULY love to remember people of their SELF and the sphere of the SACRED. 

And I’d truly love to help you feel connected.

*1) Today there are many different tarot decks with very diverse imagery. In this BLOG I am mostly referring to the Rider Waite Tarot and the Tarot de Marseille. 

*2) Casper ter Kuile, The Power the Ritual. Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices. HarperOne, 2021.