The Hierophant

The fifth trump was called Le Pape in French and Il Papa in Italian, and he was exactly what the name says: the pope, paired with the female pope at the second trump, the two ecclesiastical powers matching the two secular ones. In a fifteenth-century Italian game that is unremarkable. In later contexts it became a problem.

The Besancon variant of the French pattern solved it by replacing both awkward cards with Roman deities: the Popess becomes Junon and the Pope becomes Jupiter. This was a Protestant and commercial adjustment for markets where a pope on a playing card was unwelcome, and it has nothing to do with esoteric doctrine, though it is occasionally cited as though it revealed a hidden pagan stratum. It reveals a printer avoiding trouble in a market where the Reformation had made a pope unsellable, which is an interesting fact about the card trade and not a fact about hidden doctrine.

It is worth being clear about what the original pairing meant. The bottom of the trump sequence in the fifteenth century is a picture of the social order: a mountebank, then a female pope, an empress, an emperor and a pope. Whatever else the trumps do, they begin by ranking the estates of the world, and the pope outranks the emperor. That is a statement, and it was a live one in fifteenth-century Italy.

Waite's solution was different and more consequential. He renamed the card the Hierophant, borrowing the title of the presiding priest of the Eleusinian mysteries, and thereby detached it from the Catholic Church without detaching it from institutional religion. The change stuck so thoroughly that most readers now encounter the card under a Greek title and never learn it was the pope. That is a loss, because the card's sharpest readings depend on his being a specific office with specific power over people, rather than a general symbol of tradition.

The Golden Dawn gave the fifth trump the letter Vau, the sign Taurus, and the sixteenth path of the Tree of Life, from Chokmah to Chesed. Vau means a nail or a hook, the letter that joins, and the fit with a mediating priesthood is neat enough that it is easy to forget the assignment is a Victorian one. It descends from Eliphas Levi's system of the 1850s by way of the order's own revisions, and no earlier source connects this card with Taurus.

The card is read in two directions and the split is real. Read positively it is teaching, orthodoxy that works, initiation into an established body of knowledge, mentorship, marriage in its formal sense, and the value of doing a thing the way it has been done. Read critically it is conformity, institutional pressure, an answer accepted because of who gave it, and the substitution of doctrine for judgement. Neither reading is the reversal of the other; both are available upright, and which one a reader takes usually says as much about the reader as about the spread.

Crowley's treatment complicates it further, since for him the card marks the passage between aeons and therefore a hierophant whose authority is expiring. That is a specifically Thelemic reading and should not be exported unlabelled into general practice.

The useful question this card puts is not whether tradition is good or bad, but whether the querent is currently inside an institution that is answering their question for them before they have finished asking it. Reversed, Waite gives unconventionality and the breaking of a bond; readers who do not turn cards generally get the same reading from an upright Hierophant sitting next to a card of disruption, and lose nothing by it.