Dig into your Shadow with the High Priestess

This summer, I’m guiding you through a tarot takeover of my book, THE SHADOW PATH. Each Monday, I’ll pair a key theme from the book with a tarot archetype to share fresh insights on shadow work (and play). Today, we’re diving into Week Eight: Dig Your Shadow with the High Priestess, and I’m sharing my notes on how this card invites us closer to the Shadow below.

These brief Monday field notes are free to read. To deepen your journey through the book with access to a private chat + live & recorded Sunday journaling sessions, become a paying subscriber to The Shuffle.

Last week, we let our shadows step out into the world. In Week Eight of our tarot-informed journey through The Shadow Path, we’re stepping back into our depths — because shadow integration is not a one-and-done experience; it’s a lifelong exchange with our inner world.

Our guide this week is The High Priestess, a card devoted to the depths.

Need to catch up? All past weekly resources and recordings can be accessed via the Summer of Shadow Playlist here.

We touched on Persephone, dual goddess of the underworld and spring, in week 4 - but we really only scratched the surface of the deep well that her myth offers up in the contexts of the tarot and shadow work.

Juliet Sharman-Burke abnd Liz Green’s Mythic Tarot links Persephone explicitly to Persephone through its imagery and guidebook, but her association with Major Arcana II goes back at least as far as the turn of the 20th century, since a key symbol in Pamela Coleman Smith’s illustration of the card is the pomegranate. In Greek myth, Hades lures Persephone into the underworld with pomegranate seeds, and so the fruit ties the archetype to the goddess, and to the idea of descent.

To that end, Persephone - and the High Priestess card - become the archetypal representation of our own mysterious underworld. The parts of us buried deep or concealed by darkness. In Rachel Pollack’s words: “inner wisdom at its deepest level.”1

But, like Persephone’s two-sided role, the pomegranate is multifaceted, too. Sharman-Burke and Green write: “The pomegranate is both the fruit of the dead and of conjugal love because of its many seeds. Thus Persephone’s hidden world is fertile and full of undeveloped creative potential.”2

Like Persephone’s hidden world, the shadow is also fertile and full of undeveloped creative potential. It’s not a dead space where old things are buried, but a generative one, where new discoveries are made all the time. We just have to keep digging.

Tip: If you only do one exercise from The Shadow Path this week, aim to complete Shadow Memorial.

The underworld/harvest dichotomy of Persephone is only one of many contradictions in the High Priestess card.

It’s said that in the tarot, Twos represent the duality of each suit, and the High Priestess, and the Two of the Majors, represents the esoteric truth that we are old and new (the Torah scroll in her hand, the cross on her chest), intuitive and logical, deep and shallow (the veil and the depths it conceals), intuitive and logical (the mystic power of the moon, the human knowledge of the scroll), beginning and ending (the moon phase crown), wise and innocent (her youth and her rank), solid and flowing (her throne and the dress that melts into water), all at the same time.

The black and white pillars that frame the image speak directly to the duality of light and shadow. Rachel Pollack says:

The [High Priestess’s] temple introduces the image of the two pillars, and the theme of duality and opposites … The letters B and J stand for Boaz and Jakin, the names given to the two main pillars of the temple in Jerusalem. Obviously, the dark Boaz stands for passivity and mystery while Jakin symbolises action and consciousness. Notice, though, that the letters carry the reverse indications, a white B and a black J … the letters signify that duality is an illusion, and each extreme carries the other imbedded inside it.3

Shadow integration looks like recognising that inner world and outer world are always, have always been connected. Duality is an illusion because we are never just our surface self, never just our deepest self… we’re always an integration of the two. The work we’re doing together is about seeing and honoring all that’s there within you.

Tip: Check out different versions of the High Priestess card from your own deck collection, or use my favorite resource of all time: Comparative Tarot. How do different versions illustrate duality?

There’s a reason that The Shadow Path does not end at Week 7. Freeing your shadow is not the end of the story because your shadow story has no end. Your shadow is an intrinsic part of you - and like the version of yourself you know well, this aspect of yourself that you’ve gotten to know over the past seven weeks is always growing and changing, too.

It’s the work of a lifetime to get to know your hidden world, and it takes many descents, not just one. It takes patience, curiosity, and a willingness to accept that you can never “master” your shadow. You can only befriend it, and enjoy the pleasure of rediscovering it all the time.

This week you have the opportunity to get to know it a little deeper. To observe it through new angles. To continue doing the work you’ve already begun, at a deeper level. To recognise and celebrate the parts of it that enrich your life. To make amends where needed, to let go where needed, and to embrace those parts of you that have been long neglected.

Prompt: What new thing would you like to learn about your shadow this week?

• Access to our private Telegram chat

• A companion workbook with bonus spreads for reflecting on each week of the journey

• A discount code for my limited edition Summer of Shadow reading