The High Priestess :: Becoming a Door
We are high in the mountains the first time I meet Her.
She is covered in bright gold armour like snakeskin, that moves with a sinuous weight where it pools around her feet.
The scaled metal takes the form of a closely-hooded floor-length dress with sleeves that reach to her knuckles; only her fingers and face are visible, but I know her feet are bare.
She wears a scarlet cloak that leaves petals in her wake like a trail of blood in the snow.
And on her head, a crown like that of a poppy pod.
She is straightforward; she is enigmatic.
She trades in revelations, not laughter.
She is umbral; the dark side of the moon.
She does not show the Way,
She shows the Door.
The next time, my journey begins on a path that is crooked and uneven, littered with stones to trip over and pebbles to slip on. The world is colourless and dull. Although I cannot see them, I am aware that I am high in the mountains, embraced by the solid, heavy mass of the earth pushing up beneath my feet, and the immense weight of the depthless heavens pressing down from above. I should feel small, but I feel powerful.
And then She is there, waiting at the shoreline of a vast ocean of blue poppies and endless pale yellow sky.
She stands relaxed, Her expression one of gentle amusement, and She looks like Her card — though I sense it is for appearance's sake; an archetype of an archetype. Her presence feels like moonlight on water — shimmering; ethereal; shattering and scattering if you try to grasp it. I was not looking for Her, but perhaps that is exactly why I found Her.
She speaks without preamble:
"I sit between Nothingness and Everythingness. I am the instant of infinite silence and stillness that stretches between the Big Bang and First Life; the Magician and the Empress. I am the border; the limen. Undefined. Formless.
"If you wish to walk the Void, to journey the Underworld, you must make of yourself a Door, and step through — through yourself, into yourself. You are the lock, and the key, and the threshold."
A door. A Door.
Two sides with different purposes, but are the same thing at the core; two paths that share the same origin point. A passage, a portal, a conduit. Perfect liminality. A binary and a duality. Wave particles and cats in boxes — capable of being anything and going anywhere, gently side-stepping the boundaries of Physics the way water will always find a way to get to where it's going — whether that's over, under, around, or through.
A pomegranate has materialised from somewhere, and she plucks a single jewel-like seed out of its papery chamber and swallows it. My subconscious gets no points for subtlety — practically beating me with the obvious symbolism — and the High Priestess' wry smile says She is fully aware of this, as She holds the fruit up with thumbs and forefingers bracketing it on each side — a sphere in two circles; full moon and crescents; vesica piscis.
"Where Nothing and Everything cross, exists Anything; Potential."
— She swallows another juicy garnet —
"A seed is Potential." — and a third — "A door is Potential." — and a fourth, Her lips stained red. The fifth she holds up delicately between the tips of Her finger and thumb — echoing how She held the parent fruit before — and the ruby flesh looks like glass when the light shines through it, revealing the seed suspended in its tender womb.
"Rubedo. Reunification."
She crushes the seed between Her teeth, grinding it into non-existence, before holding Her hands out, palms up like a magician about to materialise a bouquet of roses from thin air. The right is black and rotted, the left nothing but bone bleached clean. I think of Hel.
It is certainly hellish when She cups Her hands around the sides of Her mouth and — impossibly — pushes out a whole pomegranate, in some horrific imitation of birth. I will be writing my subconscious a very sternly worded letter when this is all said and done, although the High Priestess is clearly quite proud of Herself.
"There is no limit to crossing the threshold; no limit to how many times you can be unmade, remade, reborn." She tears open the reunified, recreated fruit filled with shining new drops of possibility; potential.
"You carry the Key in your Name."
I nod my agreement; this is true.
"It is Truth," She corrects. "To be True, you must make of yourself a Door."
Stepping forwards, She places Her hand on my heart and I can feel the heaviness of the Gift placed there several years ago by a terrifying, furious Other, when I swam — hunted — through bright cenotes and dark seas. Garnets and silver. A border of teeth. Was it She who pursued me — a dark moon suspended in water, reflecting its bright companion up above?
"I am your reflection — the inversion of Self and the consciousness. As the Moon and the tides — ever changing, ever constant. The same, but other; the truth and the lie; the dark and the light. All, nothing, neither, both. Where the border lies between those is not my decision. You wear the veil; I merely hold the space."
She presses the sixth seed — a garnet to match those between my breasts — into the hollow at the base of my throat, and tells me — quite unceremoniously — to go home.
I come to awareness with the feeling of something stuck in my throat, which helpfully prompts me to write it all down before the experience evaporates into the Ether like so many before it. As I fervently tap out the typo-ridden details, with the gentle pressure of the ætheric seed a reminder of Her presence — insistent as a grain of sand in a pearl oyster — I realise:
The throat. The neck joins the head to the body; it is the border between airy Mind and earthy Body — the Magician and the Empress. So: the High Priestess sits in the throat, the place of entry, exit, Crossing. Everything we speak has the potential to remake the world — the Universe — to repair or shatter; to create and destroy.
The pieces continue falling into place as I write: I do not run circles around myself; I repeatedly cross a threshold between connected points. I wonder — what Sacred Geometry would my crossings make if I could see these paths?
Still later, when I am rewriting all of this to turn it into something more coherent, I remember that the Hebrew letter associated with the High Priestess is "Gimel"; camel. Travel. Journey, movement, crossing. But wait — doesn't "Dalet"; mean "door"? It does, and bubbles of understanding drift up from the depths of my consciousness:
My given name is a Key, and my surname is a Door, and — when the letter glyphs are placed reflecting each other — the two form a threshold.
I don't quite know what to make of this, but I know what I must do:
I must make of myself a Door. And step through.
