Weekend Update: Hierophant in reverse

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When I’m looking at a new deck of Tarot cards, The Pope or Hierophant card is one of the first I’ll look at in order to decide if I want to add it to my collection or not.

Some cards have fairly uniform symbolism across most RWS / Marseilles / Visconti based decks. The Three of Swords is a good example. It almost always involves a heart and three swords – what better way to convey a meaning of heartbreak or betrayal.

The Hierophant card is as draped in religious imagery as you would expect from a medieval European card that is often called the Pope card. The old school cards, to my intuitive eye, are just as rigid, dogmatic and judgmental as their real world counterparts’ reputation. I gravitate to decks that take a different approach to the Hierophant card.

I don’t want that kind of religiosity to be part of my life or work, even in this tiny part. It’s exactly this card that first drew me to the Witches Tarot. Mark Evan’s rendering of Heirophant image captures a very different and entirely valid aspect of the card, one of the keeper of traditions. Evan’s artwork is more grandfatherly, like an old shaman telling stories by a campfire. It’s more of a kindly monk energy than an uptight priest.

The Hierophant in reverse was the growing energy card for Monday’s week-ahead reading. My hunch is that the reversal is significant, even more so if we use a deck that has only one Hierophant card in it. I was using the Alleyman’s Tarot deck at the time, which contains two – the one Monday that the deck author describe as “the good one” which seems to me to read that same as the classic Pope (“the asshole one”) in reverse. To avoid double negatives, let’s look at the Heirphant card as a whole, regardless of whether it turns over reversed or not.

As I see it, this major arcana card has two threads of meaning, just like most of the cards do.

On one hand it can symbolize dogma, strict adherence to tradition, social expectations, fundamentalism. This aspect of the card may be asking you to conform if your natural tendency is to rebel. Not permanently, of course, but more in the sense of playing their game just long enough to get the system to work for you. Pull your hair back, put on the suit, do their expected interview now, so you can live to fight the patriarchy later.

On the other hand, it still symbolizes social expectations, judgment and dogma, but it can advise the opposite, especially when the card is physically reversed like this.

This is a call to free thought.

The energy is still very much like Monday and continues for the weekend.

It is a call to be your fullest self, set aside the restrictions, reclaim the parts of yourself that you gave up in order to fit in and get along. If you are a people-pleaser by nature, this is a good energy environment to finally, once and for all, please yourself instead. Be safe, it is a dangerous world. It is a world (our at least a country – looking at you USA) of increasing hate, religious bigotry and yes, fascism. Still, the radical act of kindness and acceptance actually does exist. There are places where the Pope card really is turned upside down.

Question everything.

Find your tribe.

Your family of heart is waiting.

We love you for who you truly are, even if we haven’t met just yet.