Tarot and Doctor Who - The High Priestess
The High Priestess
The next card in the deck is the High Priestess. She is the feminine to the Magician’s masculine. The High Priestess is seated between two pillars (duality; male, female; blessing, judgment; positive and negative poles) with a curtain suspended between them. The curtain is reminiscent of the veil guarding the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple. The Holy of Holies was a very mystical place in ancient Israel. It is where the Ark of the Covenant resided. Anyone who touched it would die instantly. It was God’s resting place, the place that God met Man. The High Priest would enter once a year, after meticulous preparations, on Yom Kippur to atone for the sins of the people. The High Priestess is sitting in a very powerful position.
She is wearing a crown depicting the different phases of the moon with a crescent at her feet. In other cards, she is simply wearing a three tiered crown. She is wearing blue (like the TARDIS?) and her robes flow away from her like a river and you can see this river flow through the cards like the cracks in time. She also has a cross on her chest. She is holding a Torah scroll. In other cards, the word Torah is absent. The main school of thought is that the scroll contains esoteric teachings, teachings that can only come from mystical or ecstatic experience.
The number of the High Priestess card is 2, representing duality. The High Priestess and the Magician are two sides of a coin (penny in the air?), two poles of a magnet, two poles of a battery. Positive, negative; masculine, feminine; above, below, etc, etc.
It is obvious that I have cast Professor/Doctor River Song in this role. The parallels between her and The High Priestess are VERY striking. She is physically absent in The Eleventh Hour but her presence is very subtle. There are several mentions of the Moon in this first episode. First, the ice cream man mentions that he was trying to play Clair de Lune, a piece by DeBussy. Clair de Lune means “Light of the Moon”. At the end of the episode, the Doctor shows up at Amy’s house two years later saying, “A quick hop to the Moon and back. She’s ready for big stuff now.” He also snaps his fingers to open the door to the TARDIS, a trick that River told him about when they first met.
Being mirrored with The Magician, she is also mirrored with The Heirophant, the sixth card in the Major Arcana, after The Empress and Emperor. We’ll meet him in the form of Father Octavian in The Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone. (Engaged? In a manner of speaking...) This is where we’ll meet her in the season proper.
However, this isn’t the first time we have met her. We first meet her in the largest library in the universe. From her very first appearance, she is a mysterious, enigmatic, frustrating woman. She is a woman that appears to be holding all the cards which is something the Doctor isn’t used to. When we first meet River, she has a sonic screwdriver/magic wand of her own. Hers is different in that it has two ends while the Doctor’s screwdriver has one. Again, River, as The High Priestess, is all about duality. River’s screwdriver dampens as well as amplifies. Hers has red settings as well as blue settings. This duality between River and the Doctor has played out in the finales of seasons 5 and 6. In The Big Bang, River is trapped in the exploding blue box in the sky and the Doctor is trapped in the black box underneath the Earth. As above, so below. A sort of marriage plays out between the two, a joining of opposites. The Doctor brings River back down to Earth and he goes up in the Pandorica to join with the TARDIS.
In The Wedding of River Song, The Doctor speaks blatantly about their duality: “It's the only way. We're the opposite poles of the disruption. If we touch, we short out the differential, time can begin.” The duality we see here is that of the heart and mind. The Doctor is trying to be the voice of reason:
RIVER:
I've been sending out a message, a distress call. Outside the bubble of our time, the universe is still turning, and I've sent a message everywhere, to the future and the past, the beginning and the end of everything. "The Doctor is dying, please, please help".
DOCTOR:
River, River, this is ridiculous. That would mean nothing to anyone, it's insane. Worse, it's stupid! You embarrass me.
And River is acting purely from the heart:
RIVER:
Shut up! I can't let you die without knowing you are loved by so many, and so much. And by no-one more than me.
DOCTOR:
River, you and I, we know what this means. We are ground zero of an explosion that will engulf all reality. Billions on billions will suffer and die.
RIVER:
I'll suffer if I have to kill you.
DOCTOR:
More than every living thing in the universe?!
RIVER:
Yes.
There needs to be a compromise, a marriage. The Doctor reveals his love and trust of River by marrying her. River listens to reason and honors his request to restart time.
River Song and the High Priestess represent knowledge gained through intuition, experience, and mystical experience. She knows how to fly the TARDIS because she is the Child of the TARDIS. She can fly her, not through training or apprenticeship, but through transcendental experience. Math and Physics are intuitive to her as well. She can feel the ebb and flow of Time. Her and the Doctor are time-crossed lovers. They are traveling opposite directions in each other’s timeline, another duality.
I said before that the parallels between River and this card are very striking. Let’s compare. Above, we see the traditional Rider-Waite card depicting the High Priestess. Below that, we have two images from The Pandorica Opens. In these caps, River is claiming to be Cleopatra to fool the Romans. What stands out the most is her headdress. It is also three tiered although this time we’re getting allusions to the Sun. She is holding a scroll that is later revealed to be a vision of Vincent Van Gogh, a record of an mystical experience. Behind her is a curtain that is a deep red color which is reminiscent of the pomegranates in the Rider-Waite card. She has a black and white man attending her. She is also sitting on a crescent shaped couch.
In Forest of the Dead, we see River sacrifice herself to save 4,000 people from the computer core of the library planet. In this cap, you can clearly see a three tiered crown, the two pillars in the background. River is sitting on a throne of sorts. She is connecting two cables representing duality, the positive and negative of a battery or power source, also representing the duality of male and female, bringing life back to everyone in the Library. River is also in a spacesuit which gives us moon associations. Especially since River will be wearing an Apollo spacesuit in two seasons time.
In this cap, River has just finished telling the story of her and the Doctor, their love story. Of course, we only get to hear the last couple words. In this scene, she is wearing a flowing gown and carrying her blue diary. She literally looks like a goddess. It is strikingly similar to the Visconti-Sforza High Priestess card, pictured above left. All that is missing is the three-tiered crown but she has her three adopted children with her. Also, this dress has a cross on the front like in most High Priestess cards. The right breast panel crosses the left breast panel. This is similar to the dress she wears in the beginning of Time of Angels.
Also take a look at the book she is holding. I have to admit it tickles me that in the card above, the book/scroll in the card and River’s diary are both TARDIS blue. River’s diary is an integral part of her character. Everyone is dying to get a peak inside. But River cautions in Flesh and Stone, “It's a long story, Doctor, can't be told. It has to be lived. No sneak previews.” Most important is that the Doctor doesn’t peek. The universe could literally unravel. It is not a book for casual perusal. This is a book that can destroy worlds, much like the Gallifreyan she chooses to write in.
River Song is heavily associated with the Moon. We first meet her in a spacesuit. The Moon landing of 1969 was a front to get her a spacesuit equipped with a weapon to kill the Doctor. We see River in three phases of her life. We see her as a baby and little girl. We see her as a teenager and young adult in Mels. Although, in reality, precluding any off-screen time jumps, she is closer to 50 in Let’s Kill Hitler. Finally, we meet her as River Song. Three phases corresponding to the phases of the Moon. Some religions would see this as a representation of the Triple Goddess, the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. Her presence is felt throughout season’s 5 and 6 with the cracks in time and the plot to kill the Doctor. She is literally a river that flows throughout Amy’s journey.
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