Every Tarot Card Priestess, Hermit, Tower

I'm back with part two of my series on Every Tarot Card. This time I'm discussing the second column of the tableau, which I discussed in detail last time. In short, if you make three rows of 7 trumps each, in order, after removing the Fool, you get a tableau that's useful to studying the cards, especially if you're using an esoteric tarot.

Priestess

The High Priestess, the Papess, Juno, Gimel, and the Moon. The Priestess is a bit of a mystery. Originally called The Papess in old French decks, there's never been a lady pope. Some people think this card is about the legend of Pope Joan, who was elected Pope and ran the office quite well until someone noticed she was pregnant. The story ends with her being stoned to death I think. That's one possibility, but it's a little weird to think they'd make a card of that. There's also nothing but the name to push us in that direction.

But I'm not here to discuss historical origins. The Priestess usually holds a book or a scroll, and so can simply mean "book learnin'," especially religious scriptures or texts. Nodding our heads to the idea of Pope Joan and to Andrew Watt who first told me this idea, the Priestess is clandestine or secret religious authority. She's the authority that's not supposed to be there. So that can be an esoteric leader as opposed to an exoteric leader, or it can be an illicit leader, like the head of a coven.

The Priestess is Gimel, which is the Hebrew letter for a camel. It's probably one of the weirder connections, but the way writers have made sense of it is to say the camel is what carries the traveler across the hot and thirsty desert. And in the Tree of Life, Gimel goes between Kether -- the very tip top -- to Tiphareth, the center. Even better, Gimel crosses a gulf known as Da'ath, a sort of phantom sephira. So the Priestess is a vehicle from the light of day to the dark mysteries of the supernal, of the godhead.

As the Moon -- an association of Gimel's, and yes, there's a literal Moon card I know -- the Priestess is the watery and flowing powers of magical light.

Hermit

The hunchback, the dissimulator, Yod, and Virgo. This is one of the cards I look at to decide if I'll like a modern deck. But it turns out not everyone likes it. Etteilla called it the Traitre, Traitor, and said it usually signifies someone pretending to be holy just to look good. I guess if you live and work in 18th century Paris you tend to get suspicious of people you meet who say they're hermits.

Some old cards depict the figure as a hunchback, but with some of the same meanings of a person separating themselves for religious reasons. The Hermit can, then, mean isolation, quiet, silence, retreat. As the card related to Yod, it's the giving hand, and I've written in the past about how this is one of the "teachers" in the trumps. But the Hermit makes you go to him. If we take a moment to think of the cards in their numerical sequence, the Hermit precedes the Wheel of Fortune, and we can say that the Hermit is trying to pull away from the ups and downs of the wheel, a different tactic than the Strength card.

Note that in old decks the preceding card is Justice and not Strength, so the Hermit is preceded by Justice and followed by Fortuna.

As the card of Virgo, the Hermit is careful, detail-oriented, nocturnal, and "virgin" in the sense of virgin soil, not virgin people. Virgo is an earth sign after all.

You can see pretty clearly how the Hermit relates to the Priestess. Both are quiet, sitting in silence until spoken to, because they're busy in the life of the mind, in both cases contemplating mysterious spiritual or otherwise "occult" topics that aren't everyday conversation starters.

The Tower

The House of God, the Lightning Bolt, Peh, Mars. Pretty obviously Bad News when it comes up, the Tower can, at least, mean the kind of destruction that's good for making something later. You have to break up the soil to sow, right? It's probably not the most fun that the soil has had, and maybe the knock-down drag-out divorce isn't fun when you're doing it, but it prepares your life for something better. This is the standard jive that you see with this card in modern writing, and it's not wrong

I'm cribbing from Paul Huson here, but the Tower is probably not the Tower of Babel. It may be the tower at the gates of hell. The destruction is actually that of Jesus harrowing hell and freeing certain souls from torment. That's fairly plausible, but again, we're not here for the history. Just keep that in mind as a secondary story about a big tower that falls down. Less horrible, right?

It's the Lightning Bolt because that's what it is in some old decks, particularly in the Besancon tradition. I prefer this version honestly. You can see it in the Vieville too. Just lightning striking a tree with a figure sheltering beneath its branches.

Peh is the Hebrew letter that means mouth, and it's why you see some decks put a weird giant mouth on this card. I think the Tabula Mundi has it underneath the tower. The mouth is what destroys things right? By chewing, I mean. And that's how you get nourished. So you can see this esoteric push and pull between destruction and generation getting laid on thick for the card.

It's Mars, which, well, almost speaks for itself. Where better to find the horrors of war in the trumps, except maybe Death? And, after all, death comes to those living in peace time as well. It's just important to note that Mars isn't all fighting. He's big dude energy, too, and speaking to the agricultural language I've been using, in the Orphic Hymns, when Ares appears, the speaker prays to him to put aside his weapons and turn his energy to the "works of Deo," the realm of Demeter, the grain goddess. Swords to plowshares, right?

If you look up the column this card seems like the odd one out. I like to think that the Priestess and the Hermit are striving to A: avoid this kind of strife, B: guide people through spiritual experiences like this in a structured environment (more or less, maybe less in the case of the Hermit), and C: reaping what their inactivity has sown. If you sit for too long the Zerg are going to rush you.