Today's
TarotReading

The High Priestess carries the energy of the sacred first-veil-keeper — the one who sits at the threshold between the seen and the unseen worlds, and knows the way through. She is the second card of the Major Arcana. Where the Magician acts in the outer world, the High Priestess listens in the inner one. She is intuition, mystery, memory, and the quiet wisdom that does not need to explain itself.

The High Priestess does not, faithfully, mean secrecy for its own sake. At her best she is the grandmother who knows things she was never told, the dream that turns out to be true, the stillness in which an answer finally rises. She keeps the mysteries safe until we are ready to receive them.

The High Priestess is ruled by the Moon, and today the waning Moon rests in Cancer, her own sign, on Samhain Eve — the night when the veil between the worlds was said to grow thin. Few cards could keep watch over this night more faithfully.

A woman in a flowing blue robe sits calmly between two pillars, one dark and one pale. Behind her hangs a veil embroidered with pomegranates, and through its edges a glimpse of still water can be seen. A crescent moon rests at her feet. A scroll lies half-hidden in the folds of her robe. On the step below her, small candles burn for the ancestors, and a sprig of lavender rests among them.

The two pillars are the doorway between opposites — light and dark, life and death, known and unknown. The pomegranate veil recalls Persephone, who travels each year between the upper world and the underworld. The water behind the veil is the deep unconscious. The scroll holds wisdom that is only partly revealed. She does not tear the veil open. She sits beside it, and listens.

The High Priestess on Samhain Eve asks the sovereign feminine one small tender question: what does my inner knowing already understand about those I have lost, and about myself?

Grief, love, and memory often speak in quiet ways — a dream, a scent, a sudden feeling of nearness. The High Priestess teaches us to trust those quiet messages.

Saturn, honored on his own Saturday, is the keeper of time and lineage. Mercury retrograde in Scorpio turns the mind toward the deep past.

And because the Moon is waning, the reflection carries a gentle direction: let go of the need for answers, and rest in the mystery for a while.

Mystery, softly held, is not a wall. She is the sovereign feminine seated between the pillars on the night of the thinning veil, the candles lit at her feet, keeping watch over the threshold with calm and knowing eyes.

I sit, softly, as the veil-keeper sits — still and listening at the threshold, trusting my inner knowing, and honoring all who have crossed before me.

1. When has your intuition told you something your mind could not yet explain?
2. What quiet signs or memories make you feel close to someone you have lost?
3. What mystery in your life are you being asked to rest with, rather than solve?
4. How can you make more stillness in your days so your inner voice can be heard?

Kahlil Gibran — born in Bsharri, in the mountains of Lebanon, in 1883; who emigrated with his mother and siblings to Boston as a boy; who studied art in Paris and became both a painter and a poet, writing in Arabic and in English; and who spent many years shaping his most beloved book — published The Prophet in 1923. In it, a wise teacher named Almustafa, about to sail home, answers the questions of the townspeople on love, work, children, joy, sorrow, and death. Gibran died in New York in 1931.

For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one. When the townspeople ask about death, Almustafa tells them that to know its secret they must look into the heart of life. The river does not stop being itself when it reaches the sea; it becomes part of something larger. These words offer comfort to anyone who grieves — a gentle reminder that the ones we love are not lost, only changed.

Today’s High Priestess lives in Gibran’s words directly. The veil-keeper knows what the river knows: reaching the sea is not an ending, but a joining. On this night of the thinning veil, his words carry quiet comfort.

“Rhiannon” — Fleetwood Mac (from Fleetwood Mac, 1975)

Stevie Nicks — born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1948, who joined Fleetwood Mac with Lindsey Buckingham at the end of 1974 — wrote “Rhiannon” after reading a novel about a woman possessed by a spirit of that name. She later learned that Rhiannon is a figure from the Welsh legends of the Mabinogion, a mysterious otherworldly woman on a pale horse. The song appeared on the band’s 1975 album Fleetwood Mac and became one of their signature songs.

Today’s High Priestess lives in this song. It is an invocation of a woman who belongs to the night and to the other world — mysterious, untamed, and impossible to fully know. On Samhain Eve, it is the sound of the priestess at the threshold, half in this world and half in the next.