Questioning The Hierophant
The Hierophant card in the tarot deck can be a contentious one for a tarot reader. We tend to be non-mainstream, out of the box, dare I say “weirdo” type of people. I mean this as an immense compliment. In contrast, The Hierophant tends to have a “normie” type of energy. It belongs to someone who doesn’t question much, follows along, and likes to be conventional, ya know, normal.
The Hierophant tarot card from the Shadowscapes tarot deck. I like how this card combines nature with wisdom.
I actually like The Hierophant card. Can I still call myself a weirdo?! There is so much more to this card than normalcy and the status quo. Sure, those things are there, but so is this fantastic energy of research, shared wisdom, and inherited knowledge. It says that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, we can look and see how someone else did it and copy that. It works! It’s tried and true! We don’t have to put in the effort of questioning everything because some things have already been figured out.
The Hierophant reminds me that there is ancient wisdom. It speaks of vast libraries of books full of the accumulated knowledge of humankind. When I see The Hierophant in a reading I feel like I have permission to go down a research rabbit hole, to get lost in all that has already been thought, discovered, proven, and written down. This card offers up a quest for knowledge and that is something that really appeals to me. I love to research! I love history! I love to watch a Youtube video on how to do something myself and then do that thing! It feels great, like I can tap into this wellspring of information and get what I need.
It can be tiring to question everything all the time. Am I right? Sometimes we just want to follow a recipe, or an instruction manual, or a how to video on Youtube. Someone has already figured out how to do a thing, and it’s beautiful that they shared that and you can benefit from it. It feels good to use all that information that is out there to make life easier, more interesting, better. The only caveat is to not follow blindly, but to reflect and evaluate your sources. Sure, we can learn from others, but let’s make sure we know who these people are at the same time. Always vet your sources.
The Hierophant tarot card from the Maya Land deck.
Last week I wrote a review of the Maya Land tarot deck, which is just a lovely deck. I also promised that this week I would tell you more about why my favorite image in the deck is The Hierophant card. In it we see a tranquil outdoor scene of a mountain lake with a canoe out on the water. There is a couple standing on the lake shore, and it appears that they are looking over the lake in contentment. But perhaps, they are actually looking towards a giant television in the sky. It is vintage TV set with a large speaker in the bottom and a couple of knobs for adjusting the channel and volume, I’m assuming. On the screen it is broadcasting a single eye, which is peering down at the the couple. The eye has a fairly neutral expression, neither joyful nor menacing, but all the same, it is a very unnatural eye in the sky.
Wow, right? Isn’t this card awesome? The first thing that struck me is that the television is literally a box. And it is a box that so often we are trying to fit into. I’d never thought of the Hierophant as a television, but it certainly makes sense to me now. It can pass onto us all the accumulated wisdom of all cultures. We can see basically anything on TV, learn anything, find out about world events and history, learn how to cook and garden, etc. For someone who doesn’t love to read as much as I do, the television could be the go to source of wisdom and knowledge, the place to figure out how to do life. Of course, nowadays a lot of our TV watching happens on the internet or streaming, but the idea is the same.
The thing about research and TV and vast libraries of books, is that it’s just looking backward at all our accumulate wisdom. It’s in the past. Whether we look to books or television, we are peering into the past to try to make sense of the future. We are seeing prescriptions on how to act, look, think, and believe. We learn what has been acceptable human behavior, how other people do things, and are basically told that we are supposed to do it that way too. There’s more than an offering here, there can be a demand that we follow suit. This is the way it is done, get in line.
The idea that the TV is also watching us while we watch it, is a bit creepy. It feels like Big Brother making sure we stay in the box, that we buy the products, that we be interested in what other people are doing, that we find our group and entrench. It reminds me of those times when you’re having a conversation about a particular thing and then the next time you open Instagram, there is as a sponsored ad in your feed about that exact product. We are followed around the internet by cookies, data sharing, and tailored ads, but how much deeper does it go? Oh, it goes deep, there is no doubt about that.
It’s also interesting that this TV is out in such a beautiful natural setting. It looks like a place that should be free of societal constraints and expectations. We are animals, we belong in nature, we intrinsically belong in this scene. Yet we usually hold ourselves apart from nature. We think we can control and shape nature to our whims. We separate ourselves from our basic nature and insist that we act and think a certain way that perhaps isn’t natural at all. We all know some things that we do out of obligation to the social rule rather than out of a sense of personal fulfillment. For most of us, there is a whole lot of this obligatory neck bending.
The Hierophant tarot card from the Rider Waite Smith deck.
And why? Why do we follow along? This is a mystery that has been especially perplexing to me after the results of the US election a few weeks ago. To a certain extent, it is not surprising at all. People respond to displays of power, like to feel safe, and want things to go back to the good old days. For whatever reason, we believe that those things are real and possible, when it should be rather obvious that they are not. Power corrupts and is self serving, nothing is ever certain, and we definitely can’t travel back in time. Yet, we do try hard to ignore these facts and vote accordingly.
Perhaps we are stuck in some kind of Hierophant level of our evolution. The Rider Waite Smith image of the Hierophant has him decked out in red, the color of egocentric power gods in the evolutionary model of Spiral Dynamics. It is not till we get to the next card of the major arcana, The Lovers, that we start to individuate and make choices based upon our personal beliefs. The Hierophant is shared beliefs, it’s that space on which we all agree with everyone else. It is conformity. It is inside the box. And only so many things fit in there that we can all agree on. They are the lowest common denominator. They don’t allow much room for growth.
While there is much to be learned and gained from The Hierophant, we shouldn’t get stuck here. We need to keep growing and evolving. We have to see that there is more to life than just the basics, following demagogues in blind obedience to our primitive instincts. It is the Hierophant who provides the moral structure for the Emperor to reign supreme, dominating us peons. But that phase is just the beginning of what is possible in our human evolution. Let’s keep the research skills, the how to videos, and the universal morals of the Hierophant but leave behind the small box, the conformity, the limitations and constraints of this energy and keep going. We don’t need to be rocked to sleep with empty promises of former greateness, we need to keep learning and growing. We need to shake things up.
What do you want to take with you in you next phase of evolution and how will you keep on evolving?