In my original definition of The High Priestess, I said:
“The real message in the imagery of this card, though, is about balance between opposites and the center point where intuition reigns. The cross on her chest is the solar cross rather than the Christian cross, its’ four arms all of exact equal length from its’ center. She sits exactly between the white and black opposites of the columns. The crown she wears is a solar disk surrounded by crescent moons, emphasizing the opposites of night and day.”
I also pointed out that she symbolically corresponds to the center point of our brain, the place where communication takes place between the right side of the brain and the left side of the brain. Because, of course, through some bizarre turn of evolution we ended up with two brains instead of one.
Our brains look very much like a whole walnut. There are equal but separate sides, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere.
The left side does math, reads, writes, is logical, is ultra critical and is considered to be male energy. The person who lives on the left hand side of our brain looks a lot like this:
The right side of our brains is creative, poetic, artistic, dreams a lot, thinks in symbols, and is associated with female energy. She looks a lot like this:
Now, you can see where they wouldn’t be very happy roommates. In fact, they barely talk to each other at all. They do have more conversations in women’s brains than in men’s brains, but it’s still a pretty strained relationship.
If you want to think of them as two separate children who were born into the same body, then the left side of the brain definitely got most of the food and the right side of the brain was almost starved to death. From the time that we’re tee tiny children we’re being encouraged to excel in left brain activities. We’re forced to learn to read books, to memorize the alphabet, to figure out how math works. The poor right side of the brain, though, is pretty badly neglected, if not abused. We’re discouraged from day dreaming, told not to talk to our imaginary friends, and we get it drummed into our heads that art and poetry aren’t, “practical.”
To use a different metaphor, it would be like if we went to the gym and only lifted dumb bells with our left arm. One arm would be beautifully sculpted and the other would be shriveled up, right? On the other hand, we can look at the human brain and see that both halves are equal. They take up the same amount of space and they weigh the same, which pretty much implies that we’re supposed to be using both sides equally, not just the left brain.
So how do we get the wonderful, artistic gypsy who lives in the right brain to come out and join the party? How do we get her to engage more and force the left brain to quit being such a grouchy old tyrant who wants to run the whole show?
Well, imagine that there’s a hallway that runs between the two rooms that right brain and left brain live in. The grouchy old tyrant can keep the door to his room locked tight, but he can’t keep the hallway locked. The gypsy who lives in the right brain can come out and dance in the hallway.
In the actual brain that hallway is called the, “corpus callosum.”
It’s the brain tissue that connects left brain and right brain and messages between them travel back and forth in that hallway like secret notes that they’re throwing at each other.
The reason that all of that is important is that we now know that the brain can be physically changed through habits and behaviors that we adopt. Scientists refer to that as, “neuroplasticity,” meaning that we can, to some extent, mold our brains into something entirely different.
We’ve known for some time that women have larger and more active corpus callosums. They hypothesize that this is why women tend to be so much more in touch with their intuition than men – there’s a lot more connection with the right side of the brain.
What we didn’t know until a study at UCLA medical came out is that the corpus callosum can be strengthened and can actually gain in size in both sexes through the simple practice of meditation. A control group that meditated daily for six months was found to have significant changes for the better in connectivity between the two hemispheres of the brain.
What that means in practical, day to day terms, is an increase in all of the qualities associated with the right brain. Increased creativity, increased intuition, increased ability to live in the present moment instead of the past or future. And, yes, increased intelligence because we’re now using both sides of our brains instead of just one.
And it all takes place in that magical middle, that center of the brain that’s exactly between male and female, logical and creative. Like the High Priestess, we absorb and then synthesize BOTH of those opposing energies and release a new form of knowledge and a new way of knowing into our lives.
Just the Tarot 