🌙 The High Priestess

Series: The Sacred and the Sensual
by Rosalind Green

“Between the pillars she sits, veiled not in modesty but in memory.
What is hidden is not forbidden — only waiting to be understood.”

The Origins: When the Body Was a Temple

Long before the word priestess meant restraint, she was the medium between flesh and spirit.
In Sumer, Babylon, and Egypt, sacred women carried divine messages through the body itself. Their touch, breath, and movement were prayer. The hieros gamos — the sacred marriage — joined god and human, heaven and soil, pleasure and prophecy.

Inanna’s attendants, the qadishtu, were holy not because they denied desire but because they used it deliberately. Isis and Hathor were invoked through dance and perfume; arousal was invocation. The High Priestess’s body was a doorway, not a sin.

The Silence That Followed

Patriarchal religion rewrote her script.
Where once she embodied power, she became its warning: virgin or whore, untouched or unclean.
The sacred act was replaced with secrecy; the open body became the hidden book.

Yet the mystery survived. Behind every altar and every prohibition, the same truth waited: sexual knowing and spiritual knowing share the same root.

The Card and the Veil

In the Tarot she returns — calm, unreadable, luminous. Between black and white pillars, the moon at her feet, she holds a scroll no one else can read.
Her sexuality isn’t performance; it’s magnetism.
She receives rather than pursues. She contains rather than displays. The High Priestess teaches that ecstasy can live in stillness, that the deepest pleasure is awareness itself.

To cross her threshold is initiation: to feel fully without naming it, to let the body teach the mind.

The Mirrors in Other Traditions

Every culture kept a fragment of her:

The Oracle of Delphi, inhaling sacred vapors to speak the god’s truth.
Vestal Virgins, whose purity was concentration, not denial.
Tantric Dakinis, embodiments of enlightened desire.
Freyja, mistress of seiðr, whose erotic power was indistinguishable from magic.
Mary Magdalene, later re-imagined as keeper of hidden Gnostic wisdom.

Each woman holds the paradox: revelation through restraint, power through presence, holiness through hunger.

The Modern Face of the High Priestess

Today she returns as a symbol of sexual sovereignty — a woman whose boundaries are devotion, whose intuition is erotic intelligence.
Her pleasure is knowledge.
Her mystery is consent.
She knows that creation, prophecy, and desire all come from the same pulse.

To meet her gaze is to remember that sacredness was never supposed to be sterile.

Rose Meow™ by Rosalind Green
A study of art, cannabis, sex, and spirit — written without flinching.

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