The High Priestess (Card 2)

Some say that 20-year high school reunions are the best reunions. By then, your classmates have sloughed off all they will ever lose of what they unconsciously copied from their parents; and reveal those true facets of their personalities that they once kept hidden, whether from fear or from ignorance. After 20 years, you can see the people you grew up with and know them for the first time.

The High Priestess card in the tarot deck symbolizes what is shrouded and what is occult—in other words, what is hidden in ourselves from others, whether unknowingly or deliberately.

That which is hidden is an essential part of life, if only because almost all of the world is hidden from us. We know so little, and there is so much to be known. Part of the wonder of life is its mystery; the sense that there are hidden depths to everyone and everything you see, including yourself; and that even what you know today might not still be true in a year, as people grow and things wear out and new connections get made. Life has an infinite capacity to surprise, and that surprise is nothing more than the hidden becoming the seen.

Beyond what is hidden without artifice is that which is hidden with artifice, the occult, of which I have little to say. Gnostics, kabbalists, Scientologists, Straussians, etc.…if the wisdom you claim to possess is truly transcendental, then prove it in the open. Until then, why waste the time?