etal
The disembodied face of the Vertigo High Priestess emerges on Card II from a background of torn and crumpled paper, floating like a holographic image on a confusing pile of litter—including some envelopes and letters, perhaps: I think I see circular postmarks and rectangular stamps here and there—all in the rich brown, cream, umber, and sienna tones indicative of great age.
Her forehead seems cleft in two, with a wide, deep abyss in the middle, the right and left halves of the skull gripped with dozens of thin threads or spider-spun filaments that raggedly bridge the gap, as if she were a half-prepared mummy. Is this the portal to her psychic world?
She is a true Crone, encrusted with age and pain: Her red and rheumy eye looks blankly out at the world, or perhaps it has seen so much that now—glazed over with thought and memory—it only looks within; the mouth is pursed tight, set against talking to the impertinent, the intrusive.
She seems determined to say nothing. But then, she may not need to speak to pass on what she knows to those who really want to learn.
The depths from which the High Priestess has emerged are not necessarily of the sort that you would wish to explore; but they are there for you to take a look at, in all that blackness scarred by light beneath her face, where the paper curtain is torn back—a whole city, it seems to me, perhaps a whole world.
But approach it at your peril; the High Priestess’s face tells me that her wisdom and experience come at a price.
Portent: The curtain between you and the inner wisdom you seek is paper thin, but be careful before you raise your fingernail to rip it open and reveal the secrets of your naked humanity.
Her forehead seems cleft in two, with a wide, deep abyss in the middle, the right and left halves of the skull gripped with dozens of thin threads or spider-spun filaments that raggedly bridge the gap, as if she were a half-prepared mummy. Is this the portal to her psychic world?
She is a true Crone, encrusted with age and pain: Her red and rheumy eye looks blankly out at the world, or perhaps it has seen so much that now—glazed over with thought and memory—it only looks within; the mouth is pursed tight, set against talking to the impertinent, the intrusive.
She seems determined to say nothing. But then, she may not need to speak to pass on what she knows to those who really want to learn.
The depths from which the High Priestess has emerged are not necessarily of the sort that you would wish to explore; but they are there for you to take a look at, in all that blackness scarred by light beneath her face, where the paper curtain is torn back—a whole city, it seems to me, perhaps a whole world.
But approach it at your peril; the High Priestess’s face tells me that her wisdom and experience come at a price.
Portent: The curtain between you and the inner wisdom you seek is paper thin, but be careful before you raise your fingernail to rip it open and reveal the secrets of your naked humanity.
—one is the "chosen of the god," the vessel of his prophesies. But it's a dangerous role, too, to be touched by the god, often catastrophic. If looking at what it's done to Mad Hettie isn't enough, remember the poor, incomprehensible, and never-believed Cassandra, especially as she appears early on in Aeschylus's great trilogy, howling about blood and guts and corpses and, just moments away, her own murder beneath the axe.