Why is High Priestess Moon? - Introduction

28 Mar, 2026

I was reading an old article by a well known Tarot creator Christine Payne-Towler. And I found myself forming an interesting little thought.

Why the fuck Is The High Priestess consistently linked to the Moon?

She is the Moon in Papus’ tract, Moon for Levi, Moon in Golden Dawn, Moon to many other less-known writers, despite their shake-up of the whole system. That all despite the fact there is a perfectly fine card called The Moon right there. So what gives?

To explain esoteric correspondences: every Tarot, every symbol stands for something. Imagine you have a tree. Well, it connects to the Earth element, because it is static, unmoving, bound to ground from which it grows. Making this connection, we can then connect it to, for example, Hades, the Greek God. He was connected explicitly to the element by Greek philosophers. And then, considering how trees connect the underworld and sky, we make connections to the myth of Persephone and return of spring. It’s a chain of connections through similarity or shared likeness, very important in esotericism. Most magic systems, (ceremonial or folk) work on how alike things are - by invoking the similarity to higher things, you can attract them, that was the logic. It was not dissimilar from giving deities specific animals you sacrifice to them. “As above as below.”

The common tarot correspondences that show up nowadays were those by Golden Dawn, an esoteric society on the break of 20th century. It was alumni of this society that created the blueprints of the majority of decks released now (Waite, Thoth). People use these correspondences even outside of ritual magic even today. Some want astrology knowledge to flavor their cards, or elemental correspondences, or to know how the imagery evolved and why. There are even people who still work with and use these correspondences for magic and meditation.

Golden Dawn hasn’t done it alone. They got these ideas from previous esoteric connections and older works with tarot. It is, after all, a well known spiritual tradition. The cards were seen as flash cards, containing all related concepts that an esotericist would need.

And it irked me that the High Priestess has been so ubiquitously connected to the Moon. Even if her other correspondence changes, she remains lunary, and moon-like.

An explanation would be to seek it in the Hebrew Letters associations - after all, they are the reason we are in this mess right? The whole astrology association through Hebrew letters thanks to esoteric Qaballah? Well, woosh, it would be fucking crazy if this was hard - after all they all went card-by-card and applied Hebrew letters in order… right?

Oh you poor soul. Divine radiance protects us both.

Most groups who wrote about Tarot worked with different ordering of their decks. This is all the fault of The Mat, The Fou, The Fool, who without a number skips across the deck. In the following table we can see their differences between the deck and which Hebrew letter was assigned to them by a variety of authors.

Much to our benefit, every one of these people wrote something about their approach to Tarot and what they see in it. Maybe we can divine something from it, or see where the break occurred. So let’s travel across time and space, shall we? As a warning, my only language of use here is English. I will attempt to make use of machine translations and try not to miss anything. But if our journeys take us to French people or Latin, I am at a severe disadvantage.

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