The High Priestess
Just north of the downtown core of the city of Toronto, a few minutes’ bus ride away from the Northeastern limit of Line 2 on the subway, is a place called the Sisterhood of Saint John the Divine. As Christian institutions go, it is quite extraordinary in that it is an convent for Anglican nuns. And it also has something that many Christian spiritual centres do not have: a labyrinth.
In the year after my personal life seemingly imploded in dramatic fashion, I started walking the labyrinth regularly in the three days I spent at SSJD. I’d walk it in the morning, and then I’d walk it in the evening. Usually, I would walk in silence, meditating on my steps as I’d trace the serpentine path, winding convolutedly in drawn out fashion until I would hit that glorious last stretch. It sent me careening gloriously toward completion…before carrying me away, away, and away, arcing around the entire circumference of the labyrinth, before jutting straight towards the end point at its centre.
One time though, with the sun streaming down on my face and neck, I’d realized I was not alone. Beside me, and inside me, was a shadow of myself. A voice without a body, and yet one I could still touch and sense with my fingers brushing along my own skin. It talked to me with words not carried in sound, but nevertheless were voiced so clearly, and plainly that I could do nothing but listen. Looking back, I wished I’d brought a tape recorder to save for posterity the conversation we’d had. I imagine myself back there, at the entrance to the labyrinth, stopping before setting my left foot on the gravel path to plug a heavy gauge 3.5 mm auxiliary cable into the back of my head, attached to a dark grey Sony audio cassette machine. But I digress.
In pop culture, our common understanding of the Jungian concept of the Shadow Self is that it is the parts of our patchwork psyche that we try to repress and deny. It is our hidden desires and needs. They are the truths we know and yet refuse to acknowledge and confront. This is often reflected in how we discuss reversals in tarot: as cards that act in distinct opposition to their upright, conscious selves.
I don’t necessarily argue with that definition, but I can’t help but feel like there’s so much more to it than that. It’s more than just the Devil on my shoulder, or the Angel for that matter; it’s the niggling voice in the back of my head telling me that I really ought to do the thing that I otherwise feel I don’t want to do.
It’s that same niggling voice, telling me that I shouldn’t have done the thing that I thought I wanted to do so badly. It sounds like me, only without the persistent stammering and stumbling on pesky consonant sounds like -st. It wears the face I sometimes recognize in the mirror in the morning; sometimes me viewed through a fisheye lens; often times, me with a different nose and cheek bones. I see it often speaking with the voice I used to have ten or fifteen years ago, tugging at my sleeve, reminding me of what we need, or warning me of emotional danger. It’s the part of me that speaks the loudest when there is no one around to listen.
Intuition and inner knowledge are key concepts associated with The High Priestess. She is often associated with the cycles and phases of the moon, symbols often connected with what is often hidden in plain sight, or what lies below the surface. In the Smith-Waite tarot, the banner behind her is decorated with pomegranates: a fruit whose smooth red surface belies an inner natural architecture so complex that its structure defies any simple attempt to blindly bite into its flesh.
Stepping back, I believe this tells us about the inner voices that exist within all of us. The indescribable words that form within our brains that steer us from what is unnatural to us, and towards what makes us feel truly safe and at home. I can’t help but think about the times my inner voice spoke to me. Like the time when I was lying in my bed at my grade school winter camp, struggling to fit in with the other boys’ discussions about who they’d want to date, or who they’d crown as “the hottest”. Or the time I finally realized that partnered sex was actually not what I actually needed, even though I’d thought it was what I was craving.
Or the point I finally realized that sex with the partner I was dating was actually something my body did not want to do.
I think about the long and unexpectedly winding journey that I’ve taken towards being a part of the ace community, and I think about all of the times my Shadow Self was trying to tell me something…and I, either through willful ignorance or biased desire, misunderstood what it was trying to say. Or even ignored it completely. How long can someone last in such a state, I wonder, before something starts to give?
A revelation I once had from a therapy session was the potential that my Shadow Self, or Inner Voice, or intuition as I now start to see it, represented not a rebellious inner nature that I had to battle for control, but as a protector. Something that warned me against what could or would potentially hurt me, whether it was a one-sided friendship, an abusive lover, or a toxic partner. But also steered me through times where I didn’t consciously know what to do, like whether or not risking joining a queer group was the right thing to do.
For ace and aro people, listening to that protective, guiding inner voice is hard. Because it definitely means that you are going to go up against the numerous assumptions ingrained into you about how you are supposed to live your sexual life: a few dates, then a regular partnered marriage, then children. It means confronting the expectations that you’ve lived with, or lived for, that came out of those assumptions: the expectation that sex would be pleasurable, or be its own reward. That sex with your married partner would yield the cohabitual bliss you thought you needed. That you would even be happy at all in a relationship that, for all intents and purposes, was seemingly perfectly sustainable. It also means likely hurting people close to you, disappointing them, or suffering the trauma of multiple severed connections that may never fully heal.
So why even listen to it at all, if it means so much hardship? Isn’t it better to just ignore it, for as long as possible?
One of the few things I do remember asking my Shadow Self in the labyrinth was what the point of it all was. Of breaking up with my partner of eight years in a stunningly hurtful, cowardly, and selfish way (me, not them), and then pursuing another unhealthy relationship with another person soon after that. Where was my happy ever after? My meaningful and satisfying resolution? I’d taken a gamble that my second relationship would somehow succeed where the first had failed, and yet, predictably (and yes, even deservedly) it wound up being even more destructive and toxic than the one that came before.
The answer: Because you deep down, really weren’t happy, were you? Because you hid your profound unhappiness and sadness in the folds of doting, caretaking, and affection without either boundaries or healthy limitations. And most of all, without respect for yourself. Because you kept on trying to will yourself to be happy, but all it ever got you in the end was a secret loathing and resentment, towards your partner, but also towards yourself as well.
In my own ace journey, I’ve come to better know and understand the meaning and significance of my inner voice. A voice which didn’t shout at me “You’re Asexual!” or hold up a neon sign that flashed out my distinctly orthogonal thoughts towards sex and sexuality. A voice which instead said to me, in that formless and shapeless language existing inside my brain, that I wasn’t happy. From me being not happy, how could I navigate out of that?
The High Priestess symbolizes the importance of our inner voices as aces and aros. It symbolizes the need to listen to our inner truth, even if we cannot fully comprehend what it is saying when it speaks. And with that need to open our inner ears, comes a need to receive what it says with respect and reverence, not with repression and denials. It means accepting that yes, you may be aro or ace, even though you may have taken it for granted that you were something completely different from your preconceptions of the meaning of “asexual”. And it may also mean that your own asexuality may not be entirely what you thought it was. It might signify that sudden flash of attraction for a close friend, amidst a long, protracted timeline of feeling no attraction for anyone. It might signify a powerful attraction to someone that refuses to fit the mould of a romantic or sexual longing: “I really like you, but I don’t want to sleep with you: I just want to be in your presence and in your life, for as long as I possibly can.”
And from that, we also need to remember that the way we interact with our personal asexual and aromantic High Priestesses is as individual and unique as we are: we cannot judge each other, or ourselves based on how we interact or arrive with our inner aromanticism and asexualities. Some of us heard that subconscious clarion call in the primordial ooze of our early adolescent lives, while others — like I — only began to seriously interact with it much later in our own personal evolution. For a long time, I didn’t think an asexual identity was one I could claim because it never once occurred to me, all throughout my adolescent or young adult life, that asexuality could be something I could identify with. A “weird straight” was something I called myself internally for long time. Perhaps I could have made better sense of myself if I’d paid closer attention to how I felt whenever discussion of sex or sexuality came up. But hindsight is always 20/20, as they say.
No matter the journey you take with your own inner High Priestess, the important thing in the end is that you let them walk with you. That you let them speak, trusting that their words are words you need to hear, as challenging as they may be. Whether that road — as labyrinthine as it is — leads you to the asexual/aromantic community or not, I pray that it is a road that leads you to a place of greater inner honesty and acceptance.
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Next: The Empress
