2/27/22 thoughts on the hierophant - by rebecca

Do you have a favorite Tarot card? Mine, as you may have guessed from all my posts, is the Hierophant. This is how he appears in the Spanish edition of the Cosmic Tarot deck, a rather glamorous Thoth/GD style deck.

Why the Hierophant? It's hard to say exactly. I know to many this card represents repressive authority structures, the patriarchy, and so on. And sure, with the right surrounding cards it certainly can represent that. I've always found this card to be much more just, benign and esoteric than that.

In The Qabalistic Tarot, Robert Wang describes the path of the Hierophant (Vau) from Chesed to Chokmah on the tree of life as a "powerfully masculine" one, to which the fixed earth nature of Taurus is applied. Its stabilizing force becomes the road upon which one can travel towards revelation. Basically, the Hierophant is like a toddler's responsible parent, who creates a safe foundation to return to, and thus encourages even further exploration and revelation. In fact, Frater Achad calls The Hierophant the "Initiator into the Mysteries of Osiris the Bull" and places him on the path between Netzach and Hod on the TOL, a placement he claims is the original one according to Golden Dawn documents.

I'm a total novice to TOL stuff, but these placements make sense to me based on what I understand of the Hierophant - it could easily occupy both paths. Unlike the High Priestess, the Hierophant embodies the masculine principle of the "spiritual" - it is a different kind of enlightenment than the chthonic watery kind I associate with the HP. Like the Pope himself, the Hierophant ties the realm of the divine to the realm of Earth, the figure has one foot in both and creates a bridge between the two.

It is interesting to me as well that throughout history, the Pope and other high-ranking clergy were not constrained by the same rules as the common people regarding heresy and sacrilege. They were scholars, and very often were occultists themselves. As Wang notes, for example, regarding the exchange of ideas between H.C. Agrippa and abbot John Trithemius, "Neither the prelate nor the younger occult philosopher were condemned for their work, because it was actually carried out within the confines of accepted Catholic doctrine." The Three Books of Occult Philosophy were published in 1531, for context.

This is not to say that I don't believe women can embody the Hierophant's path either - I most certainly believe they can and it is something I am very attracted to. St. Hildegard von Bingen is a perfect example of a female Hierophant. Learned, esoteric, and actively curious into her old age, her work had a distinct Venusian quality to it as all Hierophant-path walkers seem to have: it was expressed through her powerful illuminations, scientific biology tomes, and choral music she designed to force the singer into breath exercises which resulted in a euphoric, divine, physical experience for the singer. She also was visited by divine visions from the Holy Spirit, a true experience of "Hearing" as the Sepher Yetzirah attributes to Vau.

So, in short, the path of the Hierophant represents something far more than just a domineering male church figure. It is a combination of discipline and exploration, exploration within rules, freedom within rules. In the Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom this path is called "Paradise Prepared for the Righteous" - my interpretation is that the Hierophant can represent each person's inner Initiator, the Conscience, perhaps even the HGA - which can have both good and sinister implications.