The High Priestess

Meanings: Inner knowledge, secrets, highly spiritual, intuitive, quiet, something you knew all along that you couldn't quite say to yourself before seeing it revealed in this way, something you aren't meant to know for your best good, discretion, hiding something from others,

Reversed meanings: obscurity, things hidden from you, lying to yourself, something you really aren't meant to know

Here the High Priestess looks into a mirror and sees only themself, and this is all they need; all that they need to know is within, everything worth knowing about the matter is self-contained and intuitive. This is the paradoxical nature of intuitive knowledge. It is not learned from outside of the self, from books, others, or society, and yet it seems drawn from an endless space outside of the self (the higher nature which we are all innately connected to). The reflection in the mirror is simply a re-framing of the world outside, but framed to show us what is most relevant: and this is what we are, too, when we draw upon everything we know and intuit, the frame of a mirror which allows the relevant piece of the vast image through. The Priestess stays quiet, and encourages us to draw from this same well of knowledge in ourselves.

The imagery in this card is meant to evoke reflection everywhere that can be seen. There are the things we seek to reflect ourselves, and there are the things which fate delivers to us as timely reflections of ourselves as we currently are. The long dorsal fin of the Moorish Idol fish is meant to remind of an antenna, picking up a signal from the universe and converting it directly into understanding, without a word needing to be spoken.