The Hierophant, Tradition and Where We Belong

Before it was called the Hierophant, card five of the Major Arcana was the Pope, and in the old French and Italian decks it had a partner, card two, the Papess. In the Rider-Waite-Smith deck the pair became the High Priestess and the Hierophant, and when Waite came to describe the Hierophant, the first thing he did was set the two side by side:

We think he was right to start there. The Hierophant is hard to read on his own and much easier once you set him against his neighbors. So that is how this essay goes.

The other door

Take the High Priestess first. She sits alone between a black pillar and a white one, a veil hung with pomegranates behind her, a scroll in her lap half covered by her robe. Nobody kneels in front of her. Whatever she knows, she keeps.

Now the Hierophant. He too sits between two pillars, gray stone this time, robed in red, a tall triple crown on his head. His right hand is lifted with two fingers raised in blessing. His left holds a staff topped with a triple cross. At his feet lie two crossed keys, and in front of him kneel two people.

Same setting, opposite doors. Hers is the private one, where knowing is inward and partly hidden. His is the public one, where what people know is spoken aloud, written down and handed on to others. If the High Priestess is the faith you find alone at night, the Hierophant is the faith you sing with a room full of people who all know the next word.

We don't rank them. Most lives need both doors, and our essay on the High Priestess and inner knowing takes the first one seriously. But the comparison makes plain what the Hierophant is for. He only makes sense with company.

Not the Emperor

The card just before him, the Emperor, is often mixed up with him, because both are crowned older men on stone seats. Look at what is missing from the Emperor's picture, though. He sits alone on a throne carved with rams' heads, holding a scepter and an orb, with bare mountains behind him. There is no one in front of him at all.

That is the difference we would underline. The Emperor rules. The Hierophant teaches, and a teacher with no students is not much of anything.

This is also why we disagree with the common shorthand that makes the Hierophant the card of rules. Rules, laws, structure held in place by one strong will: that sounds to us like card four. Card five is about something shared. Waite's own list of meanings for it includes "mercy and goodness" and a phrase that is easy to pass over: "the man to whom the Querent has recourse." In plainer words, the one you go to. Not necessarily a priest. The aunt everyone phones when something goes wrong. The teacher whose voice you still hear when you sit down to work.

Two figures, then two more

The kneeling pair are shown from behind, the crowns of their heads shaved in the old monastic way. One wears a robe patterned with red roses, the other a robe of white lilies. We see roughly what they see, and never their faces. Many readers take the roses and lilies as two natures, warmth and coolness, or heart and mind, kneeling before the same teaching. They are not alike, and they belong there anyway.

Turn to the card after, The Lovers, and the shape repeats. A great winged figure above, two people below. But the Lovers stand, unclothed, each with a tree behind them, and the woman looks up while the man looks toward her. Nobody is kneeling. Nobody has turned their back to us.

Placed together, the two cards show belonging two ways. In the Hierophant you belong by joining something older than you. In the Lovers you belong by choosing someone and being chosen. The first comes before the second in the sequence, and in a lot of lives it comes first too. You are handed a family, a town, a language, long before you choose anyone.

The archive you were given

The Ten of Pentacles shows that inheritance in its homeliest form: several generations under one archway, an old figure seated in the foreground with two dogs, a child with a hand resting on one of them. Among Waite's meanings for that card is the word "archives." It suits. An archive keeps everything, the treasured and the awkward side by side, and whoever opens it decides what deserves reading again.

Some of what you were handed will feed you for a lifetime. A recipe that makes a hard week bearable. A prayer or a song that keeps you upright in a crisis. Some of it fits the way a winter coat fits a child who has grown, right once and now pulling at the shoulders. And some of it, honestly, was never kind.

The card does not say which is which. That sorting is yours, and it is often slow. People keep the songs and set down the rules. People leave a faith and come back to it years later, or never do, and live full lives either way. If you want somewhere to start, pick one custom you are glad to have and do it once on purpose, as a choice instead of a habit. Then find one rule you still follow that pinches, and ask whose voice it is. And if someone taught you a thing you love, tell them, or if they are gone, say their name while you do it.

Stepping away from a family or a community can be lonely, and you would be far from the only one to feel that. The circle of friends in the Three of Cups is a picture of belonging that can be found and built later. If leaving was frightening, or you don't feel safe where you are, please let someone know today. Our safety page gathers free helplines by country.

The keys on the floor

One last comparison, this time inside the card. The High Priestess keeps her scroll in her lap, half hidden. The Emperor keeps his orb in his hand. The Hierophant's keys are in neither of his hands and on no chain at his belt. They lie on the floor between him and the two who kneel, nearer to them than to him.

Of the three, he is the only one who has put down the thing he guards. A good teacher does that. The keys go where the student can reach them, and the teacher hopes, in time, to be needed a little less.