The High Priestess (II)

Pamela Colman Smith drew the card in 1909. Arthur Edward Waite, who commissioned the deck, published his key to it two years later, and his account is the source for everything below that is not simply visible. It is a short account, one paragraph, and it spends most of its words naming her: occult Science on the threshold of the Sanctuary of Isis, which he rejects; ‘the Secret Church’; ‘the spiritual Bride and Mother’; ‘the daughter of the stars’; ‘the Queen of the borrowed light’; Shekinah. The picture is easier than the names. It is a doorway with a woman seated in it.

Start with the letters. B and J are the initials of Boaz and Jachin, the two pillars of brass, as the Douay Bible has it, cast for the porch of Solomon's temple in Jerusalem. The third book of Kings in that Bible, the first in most others, gives their names and their measurements and nothing about what they mean; the note in the Challoner edition glosses Jachin as ‘firmly established’ and Boaz as ‘in its strength’, and reads the pair as the firmness of the church. Masonic lodges drew the same two pillars, and Cross's chart of 1819, elsewhere in this archive, sets a globe on each. Waite calls them the pillars ‘of the mystic Temple’ and gives only their initials. The colours are the card's own. The verse gives none, and neither Waite nor Smith explains them.

Behind her the doorway is closed by a veil embroidered, Waite says, with palms and pomegranates. The pomegranates are Solomon's too: the verses just before the naming of the pillars put two hundred of them in rows round the capitals. So the furniture of the card is the temple porch of the book of Kings, and she sits where the entrance would be, with the way through closed off behind her.

Then the moon. Waite lists the crescent at her feet, the horned diadem with a globe between the horns and the solar cross on her breast, and then says what she is: ‘the Queen of the borrowed light, but this is the light of all’, ‘the Moon nourished by the milk of the Supernal Mother’. Borrowed light is moonlight, which is the sun's light handed on, and everything about her is a handing on of something she does not own. The scroll in her lap reads TORA, the Law, and her mantle half covers it ‘to shew that some things are implied and some spoken’. The name Waite settles on last is Shekinah, ‘the co-habiting glory’, arrived at, he says, ‘in this sense of reflection’.

The headdress is the one thing he records without reading. A diadem is a crown; this one is horned, and the horns are a crescent, so it belongs with the moon at her feet rather than with rule. Waite mentions Isis only to set her aside and says nothing about where the shape comes from.

What is she, then? Waite's names all describe the same position: seated between two pillars, in front of a veil, holding a law that is partly shown. The card is a threshold and she is its keeper, and each detail Smith drew, the letters, the veil, the half-covered scroll, the moon at her feet, keeps saying so in another material.