Tarot Tuesday: The High Priestess

Bit of a disaster this weekend. I foolishly decided to upgrade my iPad firmware to iOS5. My SketchBookPro files seemed to make it through the upgrade, but after the first sync the entire app went away. Foom, three weeks of future sketches and five months worth of past doodlings wiped out.

Still, we forge ahead. Perhaps we're tempting the gods and fates by playing with the building blocks of the future? Who knows. All I know is I need a weekly reason to post to keep this blog active.

Anyways, the High Priestess is representative of learning, wisdom, virtue, knowledge, and intuition. There are some signifiers for a lack of patience in there too when reversed.

She is, of course, Lois Lane.

So why Lois? Why not one of DC's other female characters? Well, to me, Lois has always been a questing character. She's out there trying to get the scoop, to uncover what was covered, to reveal what was done in darkness. Unlike the Magician, her discoveries are more external than internal. I don't think Lois is a very introspective character, but she does have that whole quest for understanding thing going on at a very intuitive level. What the Magician works to understand, the Priestess just sort of does. How many times has Lois sort of stumbled her way into peril?

And then there's this quote: She represents also the Second Marriage of the Prince who is no longer of this world; she is the spiritual Bride and Mother, the daughter of the stars and the Higher Garden of Eden. She is, in fine, the Queen of the borrowed light, but this is the light of all. The Second Marriage here is, of course, the Earth-2 and preBoot marriages to Superman/Clark Kent. Lois's borrowed light is that of Superman - her relationship with the Kryptonian gives her so much more cache in the DC universe than you'd expect from someone who doesn't wear tights.

Also, I think it's important that the 'understanding' cards like the Magician, High Priestess, and later the Hierophant be human characters bereft of powers of their own. That alone rules out other candidates like Wonder Woman or Zatanna who were born/made with their powers. You have the Magician who is a sort of self-made seeker for understanding, the High Priestess who is the understanding savant, and then the Hierophant who is more the dogmatic seeker who understands via synthesis (betcha you can guess who that'll be now, huh?), which sort of sets up a nice triad that I had doodled out but lost.

We're also keeping to the date of creation here, but I suspect that'll go by the wayside before long. Lois predates Diana by several years and Zatanna by decades.