2 - The High Priestess
Single white female seeking the Divine Feminine.
Women can’t be priests. Women can’t be Cardinals. Women can’t be a bishop or the Pope. So who on earth is this woman with the audacity to wear the Pope’s three-tier crown as depicted on the High Priestess card?
She’s not Joan of Arc, and she’s not the mythical Pope Joan who was said to be an Englishwoman who dressed in drag to climb the ranks of Christianity only to go into labor in the middle of mass.[1] She might, however, be Sister Maifreda: a Milanese priestess who led a small congregation of feminized Christians in the late 13th/early 14th centuries.[2] Despite honoring Christian traditions in her worship of Guglielma (a Bohemian Popess whose followers were small but dedicated to her), Maifreda and her Guglielmites were convicted of heresy and faced execution, bringing to mind the imminent witch hunts in Europe and the Americas.[3] The Papessa you see below is a depiction of Maifreda that was used for the first Italian tarot.
I have always loved the High Priestess card. In Pamela Colman Smith’s depiction she is harnessing the powers of the dark and the light, framed in front of a wall of pomegranates, and draped in a blue robe with the sign of the triple goddess atop her head. Pretty badass, right? Well, the Italian version that she was based on (pictured above) is slightly different. She is holding a book (likely a Bible) and is often depicted to have a staff or scepter of some kind in her other hand (wand, anyone?). As I mentioned earlier she is wearing a three-tier crown as the Pope would, but she is identifiably and unambiguously femme.
The High Priestess is a card that most contemporary witches are drawn to. She is dripping with occult imagery in most depictions and represents the ways in which we are able to harness the sun, moon, stars, and elements to heal and make magic. It is not surprising that she comes with a centuries old history of persecution and murder.[4]
Every January 1st I draw a single tarot card for myself that I ask to tell me how my year is going to look. This year (2024) I drew the High Priestess. She and I have been having a lovely time together for these 4.5 months, but I cannot say that our journey has always been smooth.
The journey to my Ph.D. program has been unexpected and circuitous. I began thinking about a doctorate shortly after my Master’s program, but wasn’t sure I wanted to reenter academia. I had also always assumed that my doctorate would be a synthesis of my previous two degrees (BFA in Musical Theatre and MA in Equity and Social Justice in Education). Cal Berkeley used to be known to offer DIY doctoral programs where you could choose a primary department and partner with a secondary department, so I had always envisioned that I would get my doctorate there in either Theatre or Education and partner with the other department to create my own vision.
Then I visited Salem, Massachusetts.
My college best friend and I went to visit our ancestors on the earth where so much blood and so many tears were shed in the late 1600s. I ran into a long lost cousin who calls herself one of the most prominent High Priestesses in Salem. She is a fellow Scorpio and runs a witch store right by the Charter Street Cemetery where the victims of the witch trials are honored.
That night I went back to my hotel room and FaceTimed with my dad. While chatting about my day I happened to look up doctoral programs currently at Cal and I found what I thought was the perfect program. I had been getting more involved in local government and politics and was beginning to be approached about running for school board at various levels and potentially superintendent. The program seemed ambitious, but I was confident that it was the right fit.
Surprise! I didn’t even make it through the first round.
I went into a directionless, mid-ish-life crisis frenzy. I had gone so long without thinking I wanted to seek higher education and now the program I thought was perfect for me didn’t work out. I briefly thought about becoming a death doula, but my mother’s ghost forcefully took over my sweet friend’s psyche and disrupted a casual night of drinks at a bar by making her tell me that NO these gifts were not for that.
So what in the world was I supposed to do? Just… be Anna?
I grappled with this for months. Meanwhile I was receiving emails weekly about info sessions and recruitment at CIIS. I had casually looked up their Ph.D. programs before and had been on their email list ever since. But that would be a whole new field for me. Despite my own dabbling in witchcraft and spirituality (and my lifelong curiosity and fascination with religion and religious practices) I couldn’t just… change fields all of a sudden. Could I?
I went to an info session that was approximately 3 weeks before the fall semester’s application deadline. I was fully in a judgmental mindset and poised for skepticism. But the facilitators were lovely, and made me feel welcome and heard. They answered my questions and when I unmuted on the Zoom call saying “I have a BFA in musical theatre and a MA in Equity and Social Justice in Education, but I read tarot and teach yoga would there be any place for me in this program?” the professor’s eyes lit up. She said “Actually… I have a theatre background, too, and I think you’d be a great fit.”
Somehow I made the application deadline.
Somehow I was invited to interview.
Somehow I was accepted forty minutes after my interview.
And now here I am.
My first semester almost killed me. As I battled back to back urinary tract infections with no obvious cause, a plugged ear that I couldn’t hear out of for 3 months, the worst sinus infection I’ve ever had, a friend-family emergency that required immediate travel, and my own seasonal depression and grief I thought “Oh, boy, I think I’ve made a huge mistake.” But then I remembered.
There are tales of shamanic initiates being plagued with life threatening illnesses as they begin their journeys. For one of my classes we read a piece from a Korean mudang (or shaman) who began her career as a dancer but was confronted with similar health issues before accepting the call from spirit and pursuing her initiation.[5]
It has taken me months of crying in the shower to Demeter, Persephone, Venus, Kali, my mother, Brigid, Rhiannon, the Cailleach, and any other goddess I have ever interacted with but I am finally healthy. Just as finals for the spring semester were wrapping up I felt my body and spirit shift. Almost as if my body was saying “See? That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
I believe that I have done the preliminary work to be in league with, rather than a victim of the High Priestess in this way, but I am still vigilant. I force myself to make time for meditation, yoga, tarot, journaling, and nature so that I might avoid a repeat initiation. I thank the Goddess and spirit constantly and I talk more to my mother’s spirit than I used to; warmly and without anger and resentment (more on that in The Empress).
With my new knowledge of who La Papessa really was and the strength she must have had to grow her little witchy community I hope to honor her and my other ancestors. May the deaths of the witches who have burned, crushed,
hanged, suffocated, and drowned not be in vain.
And so it is.
[1] Susan Signe Morrison, “Textile Concerns: HOLY TRANSVESTITES AND THE DANGERS OF CROSSDRESSING,” in A Medieval Woman’s Companion, Women’s Lives in the European Middle Ages (Oxbow Books, 2016), 177–84, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvh1dnb3.26.
[2] Barbara Newman, “WomanSpirit, Woman Pope,” in From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 182–223, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fhrtj.12.
[3] Newman.
[4] Newman.
[5] Hi-Ah Park, “Sickness and Health: Becoming a Korean Buddhist Shaman,” in Women’s Buddhism, Buddhism’s Women : Tradition, Revision, Renewal, ed. Ellison Banks. Findly (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2000).