Follow-Up

I forgot to mention the potential negatives of the High Priestess. These don’t get mentioned a lot, in part because a lot of the culture around the Rider-Waite Tarot is prone to perceiving female/feminine-coded spirituality as unquestionably positive, but I can think of two possibilities:

Going too much on internal logic and intuition. Sometimes your instincts are right on, but sometimes they’re not. Not every experience will turn out like the one it’s kind of maybe similar to; visions and so forth can be unreliable and hard to interpret; many mental illnesses make it hard to trust your instincts, because your brain occasionally hates you. (I have anxiety disorder. The number of times my instincts have said that nobody liked me and everything was awful is pretty well up there.) Relatedly: acceptance and faith is not always the best recourse. Remember the joke about the guy who turns down two boats and a helicopter during a flood because God will save him, and then he drowns and God is like “dumbass, I sent you two boats and a helicopter.” Manipulating a situation and looking at things intellectually is the best strategy as often as intuition and acceptance is.
Investing too much in community. You need to lead people, so you go out and get followers, and then you’re living in a compound and only eating drugged applesauce while you wait for the comet. On a less-dire level, this could be that person at work who compulsively needs to organize trust falls and Secret Santas, because they can’t just relax and let people do their own thing, or the family member who freaks the hell out when people have other plans for the holidays. It can also involve being so set on everything going “smoothly” in a community that you squelch dissent, work around missing stairs, and so on–or simply being unable or unwilling to function properly on your own, and being social in an unhealthy and compulsive way.

A fair number of these are also faults that’ll show up in the Hierophant card, too. (It’s actually not the next one, but #5, Because of Reasons. The High Priestess pairs with both it and the Magician. She’s a very kinky girl.)