Spix's Macaw
High Priestess of Parrot Tarot
Since I did the High Priestess last week, I thought I would follow that up with the High Priestess from my in-progress Parrot Tarot deck. Parrot Tarot, is exactly what it sounds like, a Parrot-themed tarot deck. But it turns out, there’s literally a parrot for everything, and each card not only features a unique parrot, but the parrot relates to that card’s meaning somehow, as you’ll see with the story below. I hope you enjoy!
2. The High Priestess
Spix’s Macaw, Cyanopsitta spixii
The Priestess of the Silver Star
Planetary Trump of the Moon
Hebrew Letter: Gimel (Camel)
Color Scales: Blue, Silver, Cold Pale Blue, Silver Rayed Sky Blue
Correspondences: Pomegranate, Opium Poppy, Fly Agaric Mushroom
From the Magus, who uses his intelligence to navigate and structure his life, we now enter the realm of the High Priestess, who is the embodiment of intuition, spiritual energies, and inner realms. She exists beyond the veil of reality. Pretty much every High Priestess card you see has a representation of a veil on it. The High Priestess is hidden knowledge: the occult, the unknown, the secrets that power magic and the spiritual.
In this card, the veil is the moon itself, which hearkens to Lady Frieda Harris and Aleister Crowley's card, that has the priestess sitting behind a veil of latticed light. Here, it's a veil of moonlight, and the actual moon itself is an otherworldly entity that she's about to land on. The High Priestess is the same kind of ephemeral object as the light of the moon, but she's also beyond it. While she's a part of it, she's more than it.
On both sides, there are two pillars. The two pillars are Boaz and Jachin. Boaz is the black Pillar of Severity, and it’s on the left. The white pillar on the right is Jachin, and it's the Pillar of Mercy. These are the pillars from the Temple of Solomon, but also the two sides of the tree of life in Kabbalah. Jachin is the male polarity of the universe: light, motion, and activity. Boaz is the feminine polarity: darkness, receptivity, and silence, very much like the principles of yin-yang.
At the base of these pillars, we see mushrooms, pomegranates, and a camel. According to some researchers, fungi originated from outer space. The spores are of another world, and they can survive in the vacuum of space as well. They are more closely related to the phylum Animalia than to plants. Mushrooms communicate in vast networks, and because of this they adapt to new experiences very quickly, like nature’s version of the internet and AI. One mushroom can be part of a vast mycelial network, covering a huge area. Some are edible, and very good for us in many ways. Some are deadly poisonous. There are other kinds that humanity has used in ceremonies and entheogenic experiences since the dawn of time. If we entertain Terence McKenna's stoned ape theory, then perhaps mushrooms were the catapult from apes to humanity, as they expanded not only our awareness and our consciousness, but also our brain size. Mushrooms are a symbol of the occult in all of their forms.
Pomegranates are ubiquitous as a mystic symbol across cultures. In Zoroastrianism, they are a symbol for immortality and the perfection of nature vis-à-vis the soul. This idea permeates in many of the other cultures in that region of the world. Pomegranates are representatives of eternity. In Islamic tradition, they were grown in the Garden of Eden, so they’re both of this world and yet not quite of this world.
As you move up the pillars on either side, you see the camels. The Hebrew letter for the High Priestess is gimel, which means camel. Here we get into a little Kabbalah esoterica. The path that the High Priestess card is on is Path Thirteen, and it connects the lower hexad with the supernal triad, and specifically connects Tiphareth to Kether, which is the son to the supernal all father, the creator of all things. In order to make this crossing, one must cross the abyss.
The abyss is not only like an extended version of ego death, it's also categorized in the contemporary vernacular as the dark night of the soul. It's very much talked about currently in contemporary Buddhist literature. The dark night of the soul is many things, but it can be depicted as a wasteland, as nothingness, as a feeling of hollowness. It's the darkness and the depths of one's own soul in its most unfriendly ways.
So, what creature is best when crossing the abyss? A camel, of course. A camel's always got your back because they are literally adapted to survive extended trips in the harshest of elements. That's why the letter gimel is associated with this card, because it speaks to the moment of realization that you have to keep going. You're crossing this otherworldly depth, and you've got all the tools you need to make it to the other side with you. The mystery, the occult, and the unknown are what the High Priestess is all about.
The High Priestess herself is a Spix's macaw. Spix's macaws, Cyanopsitta spixii, are one of the blue macaws in Brazil and gained notoriety when the animated film, Rio was released in 2011. In 2017, they were declared extinct in the wild, but luckily, they were not completely extinct everywhere in the world. They are true parrots in the Psittacidae family, first described in 1638 and later named after a German naturalist, Johann Baptist von Spix, who collected a specimen in 1819. They were dependent on caraiba trees for food and nesting in the Caatinga forest region of Brazil. When they were finally named in the 1800s, they were already very rare thanks to deforestation in that region, beginning when colonizers first came to Brazil. No one knows how many there Spix’s macaws there were in the beginning. In addition to deforestation, the illegal pet trade has also had an impact on their numbers. In this case, though, it was a blessing in disguise that people took some of these birds from the wild, because otherwise we might not have them anymore.
The last sighting of a Spix’s macaw in the wild was in 2011. In the 1980s, there was a public outcry that something needed to be done, so independent groups started looking around the world to see who had some of the birds. A few individuals and pet-focused breeding programs were found, and they gathered under Ararinha-Azul Project, which translates to the little blue macaw, with a plan to restore habitats and return the species to the wild.
A member of Qatar's royal family, Sheik Saud Bin Mohammed Bin Ali Al-Thani, was very interested in exotic and beautiful things. He was a vast collector of art and animals, and his tastes specialized in very rare to nearly extinct species. In 1999, something happened that triggered an awakening in the sheik. He found a rare biota antelope in East Africa and brought it back to his menagerie. The local elders accused him of poaching and told him, "This is not okay. You can't keep doing this." This time, the sheik was moved to listen to them.
In 2001, Qatar signed a key international treaty known as CITES, which restricts the trade in endangered animals. At the same time, the sheik’s private menagerie became the Al Wabra Wildlife Preservation, which now has aviaries, breeding enclosures, antelope runs and primate houses, and is home to two thousand animals from ninety rare and endangered species.
This shift in perspective from collecting something beautiful to maintaining and propagating these animals is key. The High Priestess is about going to the edge, encountering the abyss and coming through it with knowledge and awareness that you didn’t have before. The same shift happened here with collecting something rare and transmuting that into conservation. Because of that journey, the Al Wabra Wildlife Preservation is key to the Spix's macaws' resurrection. With the help of a parrot conservation organization called ACT, this group committed to saving the Spix’s macaw purchased land in Brazil and has moved some of its population of birds there with the goal of reintroducing them to their wild and natural habitat.
Perhaps there's something within us, and within everything, that knows that when we're at the end, looking into nothingness, that we can be and will be gone forever. Perhaps the spirit of this macaw knew that this was happening, and looked into kind of this proverbial abyss of death, of total extinguishment. Through the tremendous effort of individuals and groups around the world working together, though, these little birds have kept living. That spirit of hidden power, secrets, and the unknown at work is what the High Priestess is all about. That’s why I chose the Spix's macaw to be the High Priestess, because I can't think of anything else that tells the story in a more genuine way than this little blue bird.
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