Mindful Tarot by Lisa Freinkel Tishman

Author:Lisa Freinkel Tishman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mindful;mindfulness;mindfulness and tarot;mindfulness and the tarot;tarot and mindfulness;tarot;tarot cards;tarot deck;using the tarot;reading the tarot;reading tarot;lisa freinkel;lisa tishman;lisa freinkel tishman
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD.
Published: 2019-05-14T13:08:46+00:00

II • The High Priestess

Unknowing

Can we entrust ourselves completely to this life? How do we let every atom of our being function as truth, with nothing hidden and nothing separate?

Recall that the Magician aligns with the known world—the world in all the elements that can be grasped and understood. He works in the realm of the visible—or at least the comprehensible—with what can be known and experienced, through our bodies, hearts, or minds. Laid out before him are the four tools of this work: the pentacle, wand, cup, and sword that represent not only the Tarot itself but also the four material elements (earth, fire, water and air) and the aspects of human agency that correspond with those four elements: body, will, soul, and mind.

In contrast with the Magician, the High Priestess aligns with the realm of what cannot be known. Her world is one of mysterious and imperceptible depths, traditionally associated with the feminine, with darkness, intuition, water, multiplicity (as opposed to the phallic unity of the Magician), and with the reflected light of the moon. We’ll see all of these features again in Trump XVIII, The Moon. The traditional imagery also suggests that these mysteries can ultimately be plumbed and known.

Behind the High Priestess stretches a vast ocean, mostly hidden by the thin veil at her back: the tapestry embroidered with pomegranates behind her throne. The implication is that we can pass through the veil. We can enter through the yoni-like pomegranates and penetrate the watery depths. In that archetypal association of male as active and grasping and female as receptive, the implication is that we can turn the mysteries of the High Priestess into one more known element within the grasp of the Magician.

However, her mysteries are complete ones. They are fully and radically unknowable. They are uncountable, ungraspable, and unattainable, and ultimately resist becoming another tool on the table of the Magician. The High Priestess knows nothing. Rather, she entrusts herself to a world that is shadow not because it has yet to be enlightened but because it is the backdrop against which everything that can be known is known.

I mean this in a very literal way. As I look out across the terrace this morning, I see a gorgeous field of red poppies. The color red, the name poppy, the concept of a field, the ideas of “terrace” and of “what lies beyond terrace,” the judgments and ideas and emotional valences that make up my sense of what is “gorgeous”: these are all things that I know. And I know these things not just through my five senses but also through my felt experience of happiness (“this is gorgeous!”), through my grasp of a world of ideas, of language, of basic intuitions like spatial and temporal relationships. And on and on. A whole variegated universe of categories makes it possible for me to see and to know this gorgeous field of poppies. That universe of categories is the world in which the Magician hones his skills.

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