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The fifth card of the Major Arcana in a deck of tarot cards is The Hierophant. The image may vary, depending on the artist鈥檚 interpretation of the card. Some decks may replace the Hierophant entirely with another sort of representation.

I see this happen with more Pagan-Focused or Wiccan-Focused decks where the illustrator wants to move away from the pope-like appearance of this card.

Of course whenever you are choosing a deck to work with, you want one that you like. If you鈥檙e uncomfortable with the Christian imagery often found in this card, I challenge you to sit with that discomfort and see if you can root out the cause and overcome it. If you don鈥檛 want to do this, or find you cannot do this, then definitely look for a deck that doesn鈥檛 cause this unpleasant feeling for you. But if you can sit with the discomfort and work through it, you will achieve mastery over the problem and likely grow from it.

In any case, let鈥檚 dive a bit deeper into this card鈥檚 mysteries.

The title hierophant comes from ancient Greece and is formed of two words; hieros – meaning sacred or holy, and a derivative of phainein, which means to demonstrate or to reveal.

A Hierophant is one who reveals what is sacred or holy. In ancient Greece, this was the title given to a priest of the Eleusinean Mysteries. Now it鈥檚 common to use the word to mean any sort of religious leader or teacher that guides one towards or reveals the faith. The modern tarot imagery is rooted in Renaissance Europe.This is why the picture on this card often resembles the pope of Catholic tradition.

He was literally THE priest who was responsible for revealing and leading people to the sacred.

When interpreting this card, I often default to some of that same imagery. I get impressions of strictly following traditional rules rather than seeking out a new course of direction. Or, depending on the position in the layout and what this card is next to, it signifies a deeper spiritual mystery to be revealed through study and education.

This is different than the High Priestess, which is mystery revealed through intuition. So both cards have similar destinations but different paths to get there.

Pamela Coleman-Smith who designed the artwork for the Rider-Waite-Smith deck piled so much esoteric imagery and meaning into each card, a person could spend weeks just working to understand all of the Hierophant鈥檚 nuance and meaning. This profound depth is a major reason that the Rider-Waite-Smith deck is the inspiration for hundreds of decks that have been published since it was created.

I suggested earlier that if you find you have difficulty with the pictures on some cards, you sit with that discomfort and try to figure it out. This is because my first deck was a Rider-Waite-Smith deck that was given to me in high school and I had a lot of difficulty with some of the cards. During that time in my life, I was newly embracing a Pagan path and still had to work through some of the latent baggage that wanted to hang on from my previous Christian practices. After trying with the deck for about two years, I decided to find another one that suited me better.

I purchased The Witches Tarot by Ellen Cannon Reed. She had replaced the traditional Hierophant with the High Priest. I thought that was interesting, and the different interpretations of the cards caught my attention, but I also found I couldn’t really read with this deck either. I learned that I don’t really care for computer-generated illustrations, and the court cards were all exactly the same image, just the colors and backgrounds were different. So this was strike two on my tarot quest.

After a few months I purchased my third deck and I was in love.

This was my deck. I read with it easily, and now almost 30 years later, it’s still my main deck. This is the Robin Wood Tarot, and while the Hierophant returns to the original concept of the RWS deck, I found I was in a better place now to handle that imagery. It still had some of the Christian overtones to it, but many of the cards were done differently. These cards resonated with me.

There are many great books to study tarot. A couple of my favorites are 78 Degrees of Wisdom: A Book of Tarot by Rachel Pollack and basically any book on tarot by Mary K. Greer.

The Rachel Pollack books are great for learning tarot, but they were written during the time that a lot of misinformation was still popular regarding popular Goddess mythology, so I’d focus on her tarot info and ignore the inaccurate history.

I also came across a great YouTube series on Tarot where the creator goes into each card’s symbolism and meaning. The Hierophant video can be found here: