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The Hierophant ~ symbolic meanings painted in the card.

The card of the Hierophant portrays a strange figure, a Centaur, with the torso, arms and head of a man and the body of a horse. His long brown hair and beard and his benign, mature face suggest a priest or a teacher. In his left hand he holds a scroll containing written wisdom. His right hand is held up in an ancient sign of blessing. To either side of him is a stone pillar. Behind him can be seen the rough rock of the cave which is both his home and his temple. Light streams down upon his crowned head from a circular opening in the roof of the cave.

The cave which is Chiron’s temple is a natural earthy formation, not a man-made place of worship, for it is only through applying spiritual teaching in ordinary physical life that it can be rendered valid.

The twin pillars are the pillars of the hall of knowledge through which the disciple enters to receive Chiron’s teaching.

The scroll which the Centaur carries is the scroll of the law, the written word which through revelation communicates the will of the divine.

Major Arcana ~ The Hierophant

Here we meet Chiron, king of the Centaurs, healer, priest and wise teacher of all the young heroes in myth. Chiron’s birth was itself very mysterious, for he was bom of the union of Ixion, son of the war-god Ares, and a cloud which Zeus fashioned in the likeness of his wife Hera in order to prevent Ixion from making love to the goddess herself. The Centaur was educated by Apollo the sun-god and Artemis the moon-goddess, and because ol his great wisdom and spirituality was made king of the Centaurs and given the task of instilling into the young Greek princes of noble houses the spiritual values and respect for divine law which they needed even before they learned the arts ofrulership and feats of arms.

Chiron was also a great healer, and knew the secrets of herbs and plant lore. But he was unable to heal himself. One day his friend, the hero Heracles, visited him in his cave after the hero had killed the monstrous Hydra with its nine poisonous heads. Heracles accidentally grazed the Centaur in the thigh with one of the arrows that had been dipped in the blood of the monster. This blood was deadly poison, and no matter what Chiron did he could not draw the posion from the wound. Because he was immortal, he could not die, and was thus condemned to live in pain, sacrificing all worldly happiness and devoting his time to the teaching of spiritual wisdom.

On an inner level, Chiron, the Hierophant, is an image of that part of us which reaches upward toward the spirit in order to understand what is required of us by God. He is the inner spiritual teacher, the priest who establishes a link between ordinary worldly consciousness and intuitive knowledge of God’s law. While the world of Persephone, the High Priestess, is dark and elusive, and cannot be comprehended by the intellect, the world of Chiron can be elucidated and interpreted by the mind.

The ancient word for priest, pontifex, means ‘maker of bridges’, for the role of the priest both within and outside us is to serve as a spiritual father, establishing a relationship between man and God and making clear the nature of the laws by which we must live in order to be in right relationship with the divine. The Emperor’s laws, embodying the father principle on earth, are concerned with right behaviour in the world. But the laws of the Hierophant are concerned with right behaviour in the eyes of God. But Chiron does not symbolize any orthodox religious system. He is a wild creature, half man and half animal, and his temple is not man-made but rather a cave within a mountain.

Thus the spiritual law which he transmits is not a collective one distilled into dogma, but an individual one which can be found only by relationship with the priest within. Thus different people experience God differently, and we come to our own spiritual understanding according to our own particular relationship with what ‘God’ might really mean.

Chiron’s injury makes him the Wounded Healer, the one who through his own pain can understand and appreciate the pain of others and can therefore see further and higher than those who are merely blindly content. Thus Chiron, the Hierophant, represents a wounded part of ourselves, where some unsolvable problem or limitation deepens us and makes us compassionate where otherwise we would be merely shallow and mouth platitudes of goodness without any real sense of what it might mean. The true priest is open to the world’s pain and longing because he himself suffers.

The image of Chiron relates us to the value of those insurmountable limitations or wounds within us, which although they may cause suffering in ordinary life, nevertheless make us question and open the way to a greater understanding of the higher laws of life. This paradox is also suggested by the Centaur himself, for being half god and half horse he partakes both of the instincts and of the spirit, and contains a duality which is part of our human condition. We are neither wholly beast nor wholly divine, but a mixture of both, and must learn to live with both. Out of this mixture comes the wisdom of the Centaur, which partakes both of the knowledge of God and the knowledge of natural law - God manifesting in the world of form.

On a divinatory level, Chiron, the Hierophant, implies when he appears in a spread that the individual will begin to actively seek answers of a philosophical kind. This may emerge as the study of a particular philosophy or system of belief, or as a deep commitment to a quest for meaning in life. The Hierophant may appear in the form of an analyst, psychotherapist, priest or spiritual mentor in outside life to whom we turn for comfort and help. The Fool thus emerges from his discovery of the underworld and the hidden powers of the unconscious seeking answers to the enigma of himself and the meaning of his life. When he meets the Hierophant he encounters that part of himself which can begin to formulate and express a personal philosophy, an individual vision of the spirit, which guides him as he leaves his childhood behind and ventures out into life’s challenges.

I will explain in my readings what each card means, this is a general interpritation taken from the Mythic Tarot Deck

Information Source: Mythic Tarot Deck
[published in 1986 by Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene and Illustrated by Tricia Newell (not the New Mythic Tarot)]