Why is High Priestess Moon? - Problem and Main Actors
All Roads Lead to France
Mellet and Gebelin reinvigorate Tarot
The first man to assign Hebrew letters to Tarot cards was Count de Mellet.
He provided a short essay to the book of his bud GebelĂn (who is the one who gets ALL the glory of utilising Egyptomania to revive interest in occult Tarot). As such, he is an important source to check. On the way, we can also look at Gebelin’s take since he is the star of the show. All of it is in his massive tome called Monde Primitif, published in volumes between 1773 and 1782. (As a note he is also the first guy to call the Popess by her new name of High Priestess). Monde Primitif was a huge inspiration for many esotericists and it’s worth examining. My source and translation come from Essential Tarot Writings by Donald Tyson.
Number V. represents the leader of the hierophants or the High Priest: Number II. the High Priestess or his wife: it is known that among Egyptians, the leaders of the priesthood were married. If these cards were of modern invention, one would not see one titled the High Priestess, much less still bearing the name of Papesse, as the German card makers ridiculously titled this one.
The High Priestess sits in an armchair: she wears a long dress with a type of veil behind her head which descends to cross over her breast: she has a double crown with two horns like that of Isis:she holds a book open on her knees; two scarves furnished with crosses cross on her abdomen and form an X there. (Essential Tarot Writings, Part One, “THE GAME OF TAROTS” )
And fun fact. De Mellet, compared to Gebelin, had access to a Swiss family of decks, which have a peculiar quirk! They replace the Popess and Pope with Juno and Jupiter (political pressure and regional variance)! So his whole meaning is a bit off, but let’s throw it in for good measure.
Second, the pride of power, represented by the peacock, on which Juno pointing to the sky on the right side, and to the earth of the left, announces a terrestrial religion or idolatry. (Essential Tarot Writings, Part One, “STUDY ON THE TAROTS”)*
Since to Count de Mellet the Tarot was in reversed order (aka shows the Fall of Man from the ideal Golden age of The World, into the wretched current state of The Fool), the Hebrew letters are also assigned in reverse. Why the connection? To him, this is a remnant of some sort of Ta-Rosh book, imagined hieroglyphs of ancient times, made by wise men to display the events of the mythological Fall of men. But then Egyptians forgot about it and they just became their sacred letters (does it even need to be said that this is wrong?).
These characters were not, in the beginning, conventional signs, and did not express, like our current letters, the sound of the words; they were the same true images that make up the pictures on the cards, which presented to the eyes the things about which one wanted to speak.
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These twenty-two first cards are not only hieroglyphics, which when placed in their natural order recall the history of the earliest times, but they are also as many letters [the Hebrew alphabet is composed of 22 letters.] which when differently combined, can form as many sentences; also their name (A-tout) is only a literal translation of their general employment and property. 82
When the Egyptians had forgotten the first interpretation of these images, and that they had been used as simple letters for their sacred writing, 83 it was natural that such a superstitious people attached occult virtues to the characters, respected for their antiquity [Also the science of numbers and the value of letters was extremely renowned formerly.], and that the priests, who possessed the only knowledge of them, employed them solely for religious matters. (Essential Tarot Writings, Part One, “STUDY ON THE TAROTS” )
OK, this makes sense, they are proto-alphabet, later added to, basically, but… why Hebrew letters as the connecting thread? “You fucking idiot, of course I combined them. 22 cards which show hieroglyphs and 22 letters of the alphabet. Fits like a glove.” is what I imagine the logic ultimately boiled down to. Well, I am a touch too mean. This book predates translation of the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. And most people had the Old Testament and Moses as their core Egypt exposure. As twisted as the logic is, using Hebrew letters feels like a fit, even if forced. This is my theory, at least.
The unique arrangement of his lettering is off, compared to everyone who followed, but here is where the practice started.
As much as I would like to include Etteila (Jean-Baptiste Alliette), who follows in the esoteric Tarot saga, I can’t. Because he had the wonderful idea of fucking up the whole majors structure by adding nonsense to it. Brilliant, imaginative set of decks, but worthless to the essay as there is no Priestess to point to. Besides, his assignments are sparse - far as I can tell, some cards had astrological correspondences, but he didn’t fuck with Hebrew letters.
Meeting Alphonse, or Eliphas
We move forward a few decades to Eliphas Levi, or Alphonse Louis Constant, one of the most significant names in modern esotericism. Now Eliphas Levi was REALLY curious about the idea of 22 cards and 22 Hebrew letters, because, unlike me, he was on the same psychic wavelength as Mellet. That's possibly because he knew about Qaballah, which also uses Hebrew letters, during his larger esoteric studies. Not unlike Sherlock getting inspired by Watson's insipid comments. And Eliphas is important because he is our mitochondrial Eve for every single esoteric author going forward.\
He wrote about Tarot in his Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic) and also La clef des grands mystères (The Key to the Great Mysteries). He also goes into what the letter itself means, so I will add it to the meaning collection of The High Priestess. Here are his notes, from the Book of Hermes chapter of the Rituel (his most prominent Tarot focused chapter):
[Beth]: The house of God and man, the sanctuary, the law, gnosis, the cabal, the occult church, the binary, woman, mother
Hieroglyph of the Tarot, THE HIGH PRIESTESS: a woman crowned with a tiara, having the horns of the moon or of Isis, her head surrounded by a veil, the solar cross on her breast, and holding on her knees a book which she hides with her cloak.
The Protestant author of a supposed history of Pope Joan found and used, as best he could, to support his thesis, two curious and ancient figures he found of the High Priestess or High Priestess of the Tarot.
The figures give the Pope all the attributes of Isis. In one, she holds and caresses her son Horus; in the other, she has long, flowing hair, sits between the two columns of the binary, wears a four-rayed sun on her breast, places one hand on a book, and with the other makes the sign of priestly esotericism, that is, she opens only three fingers and holds the others folded as a sign of mystery; behind her head is the veil; and on each side of her seat is a sea upon which lotus flowers bloom. I greatly pity the unfortunate scholar who saw in this ancient symbol only a monumental portrait of his supposed Pope Joan
First mention of the Moon. But note the wording - Moon OR Isis. Keep this in mind. (Kind of funny, some Protestant pissed him off.)
Mind you this is an automatic translation of French, and I checked Waite’s translation of this text just to be sure and I noticed something.
Hieroglyph of the Tarot: THE FEMALE POPE, a woman crowned with a tiara, wearing the horns of the Moon and Isis, her head enveloped in a mantle, the solar cross on her breast, and holding a book
What do you mean “and”? There is OU there in the original! I may not know French, I am a dumbass guy born in the 21st century and forced to learn English, but I do know how to use a dictionary! Did he try this to harmonize the text better?
Waite was infamous for shitting on Eliphas in prefaces and finding him frustrating. So much Crowley laughed at him about it in his own translation’s preface of The Key to the Great Mysteries (Not that Al is a good source himself).
We are obliged to mention this matter, as Mr. Waite (by persistent self- assertion) has obtained the reputation of being trustworthy as an editor. On the contrary, he not only mutilates and distorts his authors, but, as demonstrated above, he is totally incapable of understanding their simplest phrases and even their commonest words.
Waite’s translations were seen as the prime way to read Levi’s most important works in English for decades, without people knowing he did this subtle editorializing.
In a different part of the Rituel (The Writing of the Stars Chapter) Levi assigns something different to The High Priestess. It is a section where each Tarot card somehow correlates with Christianized Moon Mansions (which is an advanced astrology concept):
Pope Joan, or Occult Science. The second day, the genius of which Enediel, was the fifth of creation, for the moon was made on the fourth day. The birds and fishes, created on this day, are living hieroglyphs of magical analogies and of the universal doctrine of Hermes. The water and air, which were filled thereby with forms of the Word, are elemen- tary figures of the Mercury of the Sages, that is, of intelligence and speech. This day is propitious to revelations, initiations and great discoveries of science.
However, check out THIS association directly under:
3. The Celestial Mother, or Empress. The third day was that of man's creation. So is the moon called the MOTHER in Kabalah, when it is represented in association with the number 3. This day is favourable to generation and generally to all productions, whether of body or mind
Interesting. And then, when our guy talks about alchemy and sources of
alchemy as related to Hermeticism, in The Great Work chapter in
Rituel, he also talks about tarot.
The kabalistic figures of Abraham the Jew, which imparted to Flamel the
first desire for knowledge, are no other than the twenty-two Keys of the
Tarot, imitated and resumed elsewhere in the twelve Keys of Basil
Valentine, There the sun and moon reappear under the figures of Emperor
and Empress; Mercury is the Juggler; the Great Hierophant is the adept
or abstractor of the quintessence; Death, Judgement, Love, the Dragon or
Devil, the Hermit or Lame Elder and finally all the remaining symbols
are to be found with their chief attributes, almost in the same order.
Eliphas is a guy who speaks in symbols and symbols are fluid entities. In Tarot, the Moon belongs to The Priestess, beth, the Woman. In Alchemy, it belongs to The Empress, the passive Mercury that combines with the active Sulfur.
And it’s important that we get this across, because Eliphas focused heavily on beth as the woman, as the companion to aleph, the man. To him, this duality is paramount. Womanhood of beth is repeated over and over.
[Aleph] is the man [Beth] is the woman, 1 is the principle, 2 is the word, A is active, B is passive, Unity is Bohas, Binary is Jakih.
//
What is man? He is the initiator, the one who breaks, plows, and sows.
What is a woman? She is the nurturer, the one who gathers, waters, and reaps.
Man wages war, and woman brings peace; man destroys to create, woman builds to preserve; man is revolution, woman is conciliation; man is the father of Cain, woman is the mother of Abel. (Dogme, THE TEMPLE COLUMNS.)
I redacted some parts because they scream misogyny and not merely as an esoteric metaphor. And I think this is what people forget sometimes - these people believed in the inferiority of women implicitly - for them it was a real belief which they found too easy to crystallise into cosmic truth. Beth is the cosmic first woman - this is something Eliphas digs in and in and in.
His description of the Binary (assigned to the High Priestess) in Keys to the Mysteries is also simply… woman. In bold capitals. Shouted. In the Christian faith. Celebration of women. Uh, Companion to Men? Eve who died after eating apples and Adam reborn as human with her, for he loved her - then enslaved by Cain and thus closing her heart she became a Virgin Mary, who gave birth to Jesus and saved us. Levi is full on Christian mysticism mode here. Madonna-Whore complex on display… literal Madonna in this case.
THE binary is more particularly the number of woman, mate of man and mother of society.
Man is love in intelligence; woman is intelligence in love.
—
Children of woman, let us forgive fallen woman!
Children of woman, let us adore regenerate woman!
Children of woman, who have slept upon her breast, been cradled in her arms, and consoled by her caresses, let us love her, and let us love each other! (The Key to the Great Mysteries, Article One, Solution To The First Problem. )
Egyptian initiations of Paul Christian and Papus’ play with numbers
Moving on from Eliphas, finally. We go a little bit further in history to meet with a guy called Paul Christian, birth name Jean-Baptiste Pitois (yes, most of them took on alternate names). He belongs to the story of Tarot with his tract called History of Magic, where Tarot is mentioned as a part of an initiation into Egyptian mysteries. Paul is interesting, he has very very few facts and conveys the majority of them with elaborate storytelling. The initiate was forced to crawl through a thin passage and then get on a ladder which ended with a drop to a hole. And only when he lost almost all hope he noticed a gap in the wall and a way to get to it. Once there he was allowed to witness the 22 massive golden hieroglyphs that he may commit to memory to learn all the mysteries of the universe.
So.. what did Christian proclaim about our Poppess? What does she teach?
It expresses, in the Divine World, the consciousness of the Absolute Being which embraces the three terms of all manifestation: past, present, future. In the Intellectual World, the Binary, reflection of Unity, Science, perception of visible and invisible things. In the Physical World, Woman, mold of Man, and uniting with him to fulfill an equal destiny.
The Major Arcana II is depicted by a woman seated at the threshold of the temple of Isis, between two columns. The column that rises to her right is red; this color signifies the spirit and its luminous ascension above matter The left column is black, representing the night of chaos, the captivity of the impure spirit in the bonds of matter. The woman is crowned with a tiara surmounted by the crescent moon, and enveloped in a veil whose folds fall over her face. She wears the solar cross on her breast, and on her knees an open book, half-covered by her mantle. This symbolic ensemble personifies the Occult Science that awaits the initiate at the sanctuary of Isis.The solar cross (analogous to the Indian Lingam (1)) signifies the fertilization of matter by spirit; it also expresses, as a seal of infinity, that science proceeds from God, and that it is boundless like its source. The enveloping veil falling over her face signifies that truth eludes the gaze of profane curiosity. The book half-hidden under her cloak signifies that mysteries reveal themselves only in solitude, to the wise man who gathers himself in silence, in full and calm self-possession. (Book Two, Mysteries of the Pyramids)
I just want to point out the corruption from the horned tiara of Gebelin to now explicitly the lunar tiara. (There is more text but it would be too much to add.)
Later, in the Volume Two General theory of Horoscope section, he also adds:
The Moon (Arcanum II; Door of the Sanctuary)
Creating yet another Moon - Beth - High Priestess loop.
A small diversion into more French people, even if we have a ticket to England now and we are clamoring to see Golden Dawn. There is Papus, real name Gerard Encausse, a VERY influential French esotericist, who created Martinist lodges in France and inspired others abroad. His work is interesting, as he just creates his own system by creating a nested loop of 4s, which is very hard to explain, but is based on the The Unpronounceable Name of God, or Tetragrammaton. Pronouncing names of God was seen as a powerful magical spell, something inherited from Renaissance magic. Nonetheless, a minor, but important layer is his connection of Letters and Astrology through the same method that Christian very likely used - I will elaborate on this later. Huge fan of Eliphas Levi too. Papus also assigned High Priestess to Moon and to beth:
Beth corresponds with the number 2, and astronomically with the moon. This number has given birth to all the passive significations emanated from the Binary, hence the ideas of reflection, of Woman : applied to the Moon relatively to the Sun, and to Woman relatively to Man. God himself, or God the Father, reflects himself, and gives birth to God the Man, or God the Son, the negative relative to his creator. As we have seen, man is the divine receiver, therefore this second card of the Tarot will express all the ideas of the first conceived negatively.
The first card represents a man standing; this, on the contrary, bears the figure of a seated woman.
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The woman is crowned with a tiara, surmounted by the lunar crescent, she is enveloped in a transparent veil falling»; over her face. On her breast she bears the solar cross, and upon her knees lies an open book, which she half covers with her mantle.
This is the picture of Isis, of Nature, whose veil must not be raised before the profane. The book indicates that the doctrines of Isis are hidden ; but she divulges to the magi the secrets of the true Kabbalah, and of occult science. We must admire this profound symbol. (The tarot of the Bohemians, Chapter X)
Notably, Papus smooths out the contradiction of the first card not being Sun in absolutely any single visual way by simply not commenting on it. He also decouples gender from the consideration later on, but it’s OK, because it’s still Isis - Nature and that’s wife of Osiris, and she… comes from him in some sort of biblical way, so it clearly follows,doesn’t it? Thank god they had a convenient woman as a second card, this would be awkward otherwise.
The first card expressed Osiris in the three worlds ; this second gives us the signification of Isis, the companion of Osiris —
In God it is the reflex of Osiris, the reflex of God the Father, Isis, or God the Son.
In Man it is the reflex of Adam of the absolute man : Eve, the woman, life.
In the Universe it is the reflex of natura naturans : it is natura naturata.
And that’s all the most important French opinions on the High Priestess. Mostly just a wife and a woman and some secret shit and also Moon!
Familiar Waters of Golden Dawn
Finally, we are in England. So, Golden Dawn. Two men, William Wynn Westcott and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, previously engaged in other mystery lodges, claimed to have found a Cipher Manuscript full of info about esoteric secrets and a letter from a living German initiate to confirm it! Wow what a coincidence! A year later, in 1888, they, plus another member of Rosencruzian society named Woodman (he died almost instantly after), opened their famous Temple, and the rest is history. We have the assignments. They are all over the internet, in every respectable guidebook on the Waite-Smith tarot. Guys in 1909 knew as well, because Alesteir Crowley leaked the correspondence tables in Liber 777, then in his Order’s magazine. We also now have access to SOME documents of the Order.
Westcott wrote one thing on Tarot in 1887. It is one part of his massive monograph on the silly Isaiac tablet. It’s an illustrative tablet that esotericists went mad about - then it got properly translated and turned out to be a Roman kitsch. And yet, many people still kept going about its esoteric significance. Reflection of Roman Egyptomania in the Victorian Egyptomaniacs!
And Westcott references Gebelin too, with the enforced faux-Egyptian names of the Majors!
5. The Hierophant, Pope. 16. House of Plutus, Babel. 7. The Conqueror in a Chariot, Osiris
And interestingly, on our High Priestess he has this to say:
2. Beth. Woman, Sanctuary
But wait, aren't those just Levi’s notes? He does quote him all over as the source on the tablet, so, makes sense, but still, nothing original to say?
Tarot curriculum was always to be part of the Golden Dawn, we can see it in the Manuscript these two got. Mathers wrote and published a small cute Pamphlet called Tarot in 1888 and it says this:
The High Priestess, or Female Pope. A woman crowned with a high mitre or tiara (her head encircled by a veil), a stole (or a solar cross) upon her breast, and the Book of Science open in her hand. She represents Science, Wisdom, or Knowledge.
Meaning: Science, Wisdom, Knowledge, Education; R. Conceit, Ignorance, Unskilfulness, Superficial Knowledge.
Oh hey, someone who doesn’t recreate the idea of the past-GebelĂn that slowly shifts it into Lunar territory. Wonders never cease. Our boys know what mitre is and that it isn’t some mystical Isis/moon crown.
However this tract was unrelated to what was actually taught.
Book T was a tract also distributed to Adepts, worked on by Mathers and another guy Robert William Felkin. It’s also most of what Crowley leaked in that one magazine entry. It says:
The Priestess of the Silver Star - Gimel - Moon
Divinatory meaning: Skill, wisdom, adaptation, craft, cunning, or occult wisdom or power. (Book T)
So here we can feel a bit of dissonance, right? We changed the letter completely (it had to move, remember, Fool was put from the very back to the front) and yet, somehow, the assignment to the Moon is the same. This is the point of madness that kickstarted this whole endeavour. (Mind you Book T is only good at a certain Initiate level, with more info on Majors in the later levels of Adepts.)
Somewhere, in 1888, or perhaps earlier, Westcott and Mathers redesigned the Arcana by moving The Fool. However, Mathers, for reasons utterly alien to me, kept to the Levi assignment like a good boy in his small pamphlet. Hinting gently on deeper esoteric uses.
Space does not allow me to enter further into the subject, on which, indeed, several volumes might be written without exhausting it. I can only hope that this short treatise will suffice to give my readers some idea of the recondite meaning of the Tarot Cards, and how to employ them in divination.
Mind you, at this point he and Westcott were working on opening the first temple. It is possible he was baiting people into his soon to be opened Order, not unlike ARGs used to promote products nowadays. And as a note, eventually, they developed their own occult tarot, not like Etteila’s fortune-telling focused tarot. Theirs tried to legitimately be occult and contain explicitly esoteric correspondences and ideas. This Golden Dawn deck would later become the inspiration for both the Thoth deck of Crowley-Harris deck and Waite-Smith deck. Most sources corroborate the fact that at a certain point, the Initiates of the Order had to paint their own decks, to ascend the hierarchy.
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