The Lady Beneath the Water

On synchronicity, submerged cities, and why The High Priestess arrived exactly when she did.

There are moments in creative work that feel less like invention and more like excavation.

For months, really years I circled around the question of who The High Priestess would become in my Curious Tales Tarot.

I knew she had to embody mystery, memory, intuition, and the hidden feminine current that runs beneath myth and history alike. Not secrecy for secrecy’s sake, but sacred concealment. The kind that waits patiently beneath the surface until the world is finally ready to see it.

And then she arrived:

The Lady of the Lake.

Not merely a woman in water, but a keeper of thresholds. A guardian of what has been submerged. A figure who understands that what disappears is not always gone.

So I finally released her into the world through today’s card reveal:

“The High Priestess - The Lady of the Lake.”

“What is hidden beneath the water still shapes the world above.”

And almost immediately afterward, I stumbled across a news story announcing that archaeologists had uncovered an “Atlantis-like” lost city beneath a lake in Kyrgyzstan, a submerged medieval settlement complete with streets, structures, and traces of forgotten lives resting silently underwater.  

• A city beneath the water.

• Hidden knowledge resurfacing.

• Ancient memory rising from the depths.

You can call it coincidence if you want.

But artists know there is a strange rhythm to these things.

The High Priestess and the Deep

The High Priestess has always belonged to liminal spaces: moonlight, dreams, intuition, silence, hidden texts, submerged truths. In traditional tarot imagery, she sits between pillars guarding mysteries that cannot be forced open intellectually. She is not revelation through conquest,  she is revelation through listening.

That is why the Lady of the Lake felt so perfect.

Across Arthurian mythology, the Lady exists at the threshold between worlds. She emerges from water carrying power, prophecy, and transformation.

Water in myth is rarely just water. It is the unconscious. The ancestral. The forgotten. The emotional undercurrent beneath civilization itself.

And now, in the real world, archaeologists are literally diving beneath a lake and finding a lost city waiting there in silence.

The symbolism is almost absurdly on the nose.

Atlantis, Avalon, and the Human Imagination

Human beings have always been haunted by drowned places.

Atlantis. Ys. Lyonesse. Avalon. Sunken kingdoms appear again and again in mythology because they represent something psychologically eternal: the fear that wisdom can be lost… and the hope that it can someday return.

The newly reported underwater settlement beneath Lake Issyk-Kul has already been described in headlines as “Atlantis-like,” with preserved structures and evidence of medieval trade routes hidden beneath shallow waters.  

Whether or not the comparison is sensationalized almost doesn’t matter. The emotional resonance is immediate because the image itself is archetypal.

• A city beneath the lake.

• Knowledge beneath consciousness.

• Memory beneath forgetting.

That is pure High Priestess energy.

Creative Work as Synchronicity

Carl Jung used the word synchronicity to describe meaningful coincidence when moments in the external world seems to mirror an inner psychological process in ways too uncanny to ignore.

Artists encounter this constantly.

You become obsessed with a symbol, and suddenly it appears everywhere. You write about wolves and start dreaming of forests. You paint moons and then find yourself surrounded by lunar imagery in songs, films, conversations, headlines.

It begins to feel less like you are creating the work and eerily, more like the work is moving through you.

That is what this moment felt like for me.

After years of building correspondences, symbolism, folklore threads, and archetypal connections for Curious Tales Tarot, I finally chose the Lady of the Lake as my High Priestess,  and within hours the world handed me a headline about a hidden city rising from beneath the water.

Sometimes reality winks back.

You can explore the full card reveal here:

Curious Tales Tarot - The High Priestess