ARTEMIS - HIGH PRIESTESS
HIGH PRIESTESS ARTEMIS by Iona Miller
https://holographicarchetypes.weebly.com/artemis.html
There are two distinct forms of the goddess Artemis. She corresponds with both THE HIGH PRIESTESS (Trump II) and ART (Trump XIV). As The High Priestess, Artemis as Virgin-Mother, is the mediator of the highest mystical experiences. She is the way to true initiation. In mystical meditation we become receptive to divine grace. Her path reaches through and beyond the great Void, THE ABYSS, to the highest unitive states of consciousness. Mystical experience connects self-actualization with god-realization. She is the link between the archetypal and formative worlds, the matrix of eternal patterns with unique manifestations.
Both THE HIGH PRIESTESS and ART lie on the vertical axis of THE TREE OF LIFE. This vertical axis, known as The Middle Pillar, represents the quickest, most equilibrated Path to mystical attainment. Artemis inhabits the extreme middle position, where the "medium" and the "amazon" represent poles of a single archetype. She is equivalent to the alchemical Anima Mundi, or World Soul.
Artemis bridges our perceptions of the world by stimulating the imaginative faculty. Only a particular facet of woman plays this role of mediator (or medium) to man concerning the mysteries of his own psyche. That woman has a role to play which is inherent in her nature. It is not the role of sharing his intellectual interests or providing his meals. It is also not becoming the mother of his children nor being his sexual partner. The Artemisian role is to be a mediator to man of his creative inspirations, a channel where the riches of the unconscious can flow to him more easily than if she were not present.
For women, she inspires also, from a depth beyond that of the "masculine" ego-consciousness. It takes a high degree of focused consciousness in a woman for her to be able to observe what she is in fact doing instinctively. It is vitally important for a woman who is handling these images from the collective unconscious to have a strong ego to withstand the regressive pull of the unconscious. If she does not, she may be lost in the maze of the transcendent imagination, causing confusion to herself and those around her (sorceress' apprentice). The mediumistic woman is an initiator. If she becomes devoted to a religious creed or spiritual science, she will put herself in its service. Alternatively, she may find herself expressing the spirit of an epoch. In every event, the spiritual woman is mediating archetypal images to consciousness.
THE HIGH PRIESTESS is an inner experience. She is intuition and inspiration and kindred experiences. These come from a hidden, inner world and the aspirant must be receptive to their whisperings and visionary states. If a person loses their receptivity, enmeshed in the veils of the conscious, egoistic mind and the material world, then She cannot be realized. We must learn to be quiet and meditate so that the light shines through her influences. At the last moment we must give up our aspiration, becoming receptive and quiescent, so the Light makes its way through us.
The feminine aspect of nature brings forth a child through the mystery of birth. This child may not be human, but the result of a creative conception. It may be the result of a moment of genius--a poem, painting, idea, or discovery. The child is incubated in the silent womb of the goddess, protected until the moment of emergence.
First comes a union of opposites, then a period of quietude and gestation, nurturing and withdrawl. Then the birth of genius, the result, the child. When an individual has undergone the required initiations, or gained a proper relationship to the feminine principle, Self mediates the flood of imagery from the unconscious. Artemis gives it value and meaning from her perspective as The High Priestess of inspiration. This is the highest incarnation of the feminine principle in its function of spirit, or divine knowledge.
In Christianity, this role is filled by the Blessed Virgin Mary, and in Gnostic sects she was known as the Sophia. She is an inner daemon whose acquaintance brings awareness of the ultimate reality of our own natures. She bestows an experience of immortality by lifting us from the daily time frame into a sacred realm of metaphorical perception. This adds a sacred dimension to life's events.
The moon goddess, in her crescent phase, is Virgin in the psychological sense of the word. In ancient times, the virgin was distinguished by the fact that she was not dependent on what others thought. She was no slave to conventional behavior. Rather, she was motivated by contact with her core Self, the well-spring of her being. Being true to herself, the Artemisian woman feels no need to capture, possess, or conciliate a husband.
Even in marriage, the role she plays expresses her own fierce individuality. She bears her divinity in her own right, not as merely counterpart to man. Virginity is an inner attitude which may seem unconventional, but it is traditional since it is concerned with gaining a right relationship to the goddess. Its values come from our deep interior processes, not external dictates. Motives are misplaced if the only result is development of a headstrong egocentricity. Thought in its widest sense is a constructive process utilizing internal representations, and so is inner spiritual life. These representations may be visual images, speech images, or musical images, even scents, which classically are reported in spiritual experiences.
Thus consciousness is a self-organizing, emergent property of living organisms. The ability to construct internal representations of sensory stimuli, which underlies perception and cognition, is also an emergent property. Viewed objectively, internal representations are perfectly concrete entities, even though we can't yet characterize them precisely. But internal representations also have a subjective aspect: in certain situations we are aware of them. Consciousness is central to being and directly accessible by intuition. But it is not beyond perception; it is the very stuff of perception.
