The card shows a beautiful woman standing behind many layers of veil, leafy branches, and heavy curtains. The layers are parted to partly display and partly conceal her. There is a playing card tucked into the draperies by her feet.

The High Priestess in the deck is the second version I did of this card. The original version was one of those slavish imitations of the symbolism on the Waite-Smith deck, but done using Dover-style art, for an effect that was more whimsical than meaningful. If I recall correctly, there was a woman sitting in a high-backed wicker chair, with the night sky behind, and she was sort of leaning to one side with a daydreaming expression on her face. Instead of pillars she had huge binoculars on either side of her (I also used binoculars for pillars on the Moon card, where I think it works better). And there were little tiny corsets on the back of the chair instead of pomegranates.

As I started to "spread my wings" a little and grew more comfortable with the Tarot, I realized that I didn't have to precisely mimic the Waite imagery, I could be a little more interpretive. This card was one that I wanted to do over right away. The funny thing is, I had had the image of the woman in my files already for a long time. In fact it was one of the first pieces of source imagery I ever collected.

When I was in college I got somewhat involved with zines (you know, that thing people used to do on paper before we had the Internet to suck up all our free time :) and I started making collages as cover art for my friends' zines. I was really interested in the Max Ernst style for two reasons: 1. it was arrestingly beautiful, and 2. zines were always photocopied and collages of black and white engravings photocopy very well. So I guess in a way I was making a virtue out of  necessity.

I was doing this pretty much on my own, without books or FAQs or whatever to tell me how to go about it. I didn't know about the Dover Pictorial Archive, but I did know that the Duke library had a good collection of art books. So I spent a lot of time sitting in the library paging through old books, looking for interesting art that I could use in these collages.

Anytime I found something interesting, I'd photocopy it just in case. I even photocopied illustrated alphabets and pieced them together to spell out the names of the zines. (this was back in the day and I didn't have a computer or anything like that.) Around this time I found the Illustrated London News, which is the source of most of my collage material. I wish I could describe the thunderstruck moment when I discovered the motherlode of Victorian engravings, but I honestly don't remember exactly when I stumbled onto it.

But I was talking about the High Priestess. The illustration of the lady came from Harper's New Monthly Magazine. It accompanied a short story which must not have been very memorable, because I don't remember it. I had it in mind for a zine cover and ended up not using it, which is lucky because back then I never used to save a copy of  the source material, I'd just chop up my only copy and use it in whatever I was working on at the time. I guess when you're 19 you don't think much about saving things for future needs or posterity.

So I had this fantastic illustration of a lady standing in the trees with a veil floating over her. I had a stack of fantastic illustrations that I carried around with me for years. Like seamstresses have a trunk full of fabric that they haul to every new abode. (Actually I have one of those too.) So anyway, when I started working on redoing the High Priestess I went through my stack of source material and this woman really jumped out at me. She was so perfect, I couldn't believe I hadn't seen it the first time around.

I think this card must have been the first major departure from Waite-Smith imagery for me because I remember feeling nervous about doing something so different. I was afraid that because it didn't have pomegranates and pillars with "B" and "J" on them and a crescent moon on her head and etc, people might feel that it wasn't really the High Priestess. In retrospect that sounds stupid but I did feel nervous about the image being too streamlined, not having enough of what Bob O'Neill would call "gobbledy-gook".

I did add a little playing card tucked into the draperies in honor of the Sorceress card in Arnell Ando's Transformational Tarot. Arnell and her deck have been a major inspiration for my study of Tarot and I wanted to pay tribute to the influence she's had over my work. She is a true Sorceress to me :)

Sarah Ovenall
Victoria Regina Tarot
http://www.thefool.com