OK, I'd really balk at any link between the High Priestess and the Virgin Mary, I think. Scary & sexual vs. well, the Virgin Mary. Pure and soothing.
That said, your friend might find some worthwhile imagery looking into the Black Madonna, a common motif in folk Catholicism.
Here's one OK link site.
There might also be some wiggle room with some of the equivalences between the virgin and some of the lwa, who pop up in some tarot decks. That process, syncretism, might be a good model to work off, actually.
Like Erzulie or Oshun to Nuestra Senora del Caridad del Cobre to Our Lady of Charity.
As far as high level research, though, I'm drawing a blank. I'm positive there's reams of stuff on the iconography of Mary, but occult stuff tends not to be peer reviewed. I ran across one good book a while back on the history of the tarot... no idea of title and author, but I remember it was a he, I probably wrote about it here, and he talked a lot about tarrochi, the Renaissance card game today's tarot deck came from. ("The Game of Tarot" maybe? "The History of Tarot"?)
Oh, and this site might be useful: The Thacher Gallery - Bringing the Dark Madonna to Light
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