Major Arcana · II
☽︎ Moon · ג Gimel · Thoth: The Priestess
The answer is not out there yet; it is inside, under the surface. Be quiet, watch your dreams, and let what you already know rise.
Gimel, the camel, is the ship of the desert, the beast that carries water through the waste. The Talmud reads Gimel and the next letter Daleth together as gomel dalim, “one who gives to the poor”: the camel-rider carrying alms to the door. It is a Double letter; its value is 3, and in Kaplan’s Sepher Yetzirah its opposites are Wealth and Poverty.
The 13th path is the longest on the Tree, running straight down the Middle Pillar from Kether to Tiphareth and crossing the Abyss at Daath. It is the path of the Holy Guardian Angel’s descent and of the mystic’s ascent: the direct line from the human self to the divine, which is why the Golden Dawn calls it the path of the Priestess of the Silver Star and why it is called the Uniting Intelligence. The desert it crosses is the Abyss.
Smith’s High Priestess sits between the black and white pillars of Solomon’s Temple, Boaz and Jachin, before a veil embroidered with pomegranates. She wears the triple crown of Isis-Hathor with the moon, a solar cross on her breast, and holds a scroll lettered TORA half-hidden in her robe. A crescent moon lies at her feet. Waite calls her the Secret Tradition and the Shekhinah; Case’s key word is memory, the subconscious that records everything and gives it back.
Crowley’s Priestess is Isis as the eternal virgin and Artemis the huntress, veiled in light, with a bow across her knees; her network of light is the veil of Isis that is both concealment and revelation. Fruits, seeds and crystals at the base of the card are the beginnings of life, and a camel walks below. Crowley calls her “the connecting link between the archetypal and the formative worlds”, and also “the most spiritual form of Isis”, pure potential before any image.
In the Marseille deck she is La Papesse, the Female Pope, which some historians link to the legend of Pope Joan and others to the Visconti family’s Guglielmite heretic Maifreda da Pirovano. The Golden Dawn turned her into the Priestess of the Moon.
Card image: Pamela Colman Smith, Rider-Waite tarot, 1909 (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).