The Hierophant
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The Marseilles card
The Waite-Smith card
The Card & the Image
Had the real meanings of the Tarot cards been known, they would have been considered heretical to the ruling authority of the Catholic Church in the Middles Ages. Therefore, their real meanings were disguised behind images that would not appear threatening or subversive. Perhaps the most masterful disguise is the card once called The Pope, but which we will refer to as The Hierophant. This image has nothing to do with the Catholic Pope or the church he heads; rather, it represents exactly that which the Church wished to destroy on its road to spiritual hegemony: individual, personal contact with God or the spiritual realms. For the Church wished to monopolize all spiritual authority and all means of access to any spiritual beings, which is why they declared that Jesus was and would only ever be the sole means of contact with God, and he—at least the idea of him they created—was their property. A neat trick, this, which the Church played across Europe for many centuries. What is important for us, though, is not the Catholic veneer but what lies beneath it.
Let’s examine the names of this card. Remembering that Tarot figures depict archetypal roles and not individuals (or even a succession of them), the figure on this card does not represent the Catholic Pope. An earlier name for pope was pontiff or pontifex, which came from pagan Rome before the Christian era. From this we get the idea of any spiritual teacher, one able to exist in and commune between both realms. The name of this card was changed later in most decks from Pope to Hierophant, which in Greek means “one who teaches holy things,” another reference to a spiritual mediator.
Bridges are built over water. Symbolically, a passage over water means passage from one realm of consciousness to another. Jesus, a spiritual mediator par excellence, “walked on the waters,” meaning having dominion over the world of forms and change. The various lands of the Golden Age are all reached by crossing an ocean or river. Avalon, where Arthur waits to redeem an age, lies across water, as does the realm of faerie.
The idea, then, is that the function of this card is communication with the spiritual realm. This need not be, and essentially is not, an actual person such as a guru or teacher. Rather, sometimes a guru fills this role for a time until the student achieves (and becomes) what the guru bestows. In this day in the West, qualified gurus are in scant supply; moreover, the student is often so immature spiritually (as the Fool recognizes), that telling a qualified guru from a charlatan isn’t always easy. Here, we adopt a more generalized understanding of the Hierophant: it is one’s own higher self in various guises the Fool can relate to. As the spiritual realms are formless, as we understand that term, a spiritual being should be able to take many different forms, as well as no form at all. At the beginning of the journey, any form perceived by the Fool arises from the Fool’s unconscious mind, so the teacher’s form is secondary to that which the teacher communicates, which might be words, but is more likely to be coded symbolically.