major arcana
Suit: Trumps Major Arcana
Also known as The Pope.
The Hierophant keeps and transmits a received teaching. He speaks of initiation, shared doctrine and guidance within a tradition, along with the authority—and the limits—of those who guard its forms.
A card carries more than one history. Its place in the tarot pack, Golden Dawn path, Rider–Waite–Smith reading and later variants are kept beside their own sources, since the same name can do different work in different decks.
7 sourced claims: 4 traditional , 3 modern
This deck publishes no meanings, and none are supplied for it here. Marseille packs were printed for play, and the divinatory readings attached to them by Etteilla and his successors came later and from outside — presenting those as this deck's own would date them a century too early.
This deck calls the card Jupiter; it is filed here as The Hierophant and numbers it V.
This deck's book publishes no upright and reversed lists, so none are shown. Its account of the card is cited below rather than reproduced.
This is a Besançon-type pack: where most Marseille printings put the Popess and the Pope, it prints Jupiter — a substitution made to avoid giving offence, and one that leaves the numbering untouched. The numerals are additive — IIII, VIIII, XVIIII — not the subtractive IV, IX and XIX of modern usage.
Lequart, Paris, Marseille — BnF, Estampes et photographie, BOITE FOL-KH-383.
The Hierophant
A triple-crowned pontiff blesses two ministers between pillars above crossed keys, representing organized sacred teaching and its visible hierarchy.
A concise paraphrase of Waite's published explanation of the Pamela Colman Smith design, not a universal description of all historical decks.
Upright, Waite associates The Hierophant with alliance, mercy, inspiration, guidance and formal bonds such as marriage. Reversed, the card can point to excessive conformity, weakness or dependence on conventional approval.
Waite himself warns that many fortune-telling allocations are artificial and arbitrary; these are historical Rider–Waite–Smith meanings, not assertions of fact.
Hermetic Qabalah
Book T establishes this Tarot-to-letter attribution. The path number and endpoints belong to this tradition's canonical Kircher arrangement.
Book T's formal title, Tree or elemental place, astrological attribution, and characteristic reading. This is the system used by the Hermetic Tree.
The Magus of the Eternal
The formal esoteric title printed in Book T.
ו · Vav
A Golden Dawn correspondence, not a claim about the historical origin of the card or a universal Jewish letter-to-card system.
Taurus
Book T's attribution carried by the Hebrew letter and therefore by this path.
Divine wisdom, manifestation, explanation, teaching, and occult force consciously invoked.
Paraphrased from Book T's brief meanings; its dignity method reads a card in relation to neighbouring cards rather than as a fixed keyword.
Historical context and places where influential decks or occult systems differ.
One of the twenty-one figured trumps plus the Fool found beside the four ordinary suits in historical tarot packs.
Museum history dates the earliest documentary references to the 1440s–1450s in northern Italy and identifies tarot's original use as a trick-taking game. The occult-Qabalistic reading is later.
| Relation | To | First attested |
|---|---|---|
| Tarot trump of | Path 16 · Vav | 1888 CE |
| Hebrew-letter attribution | Vav | 1888 CE |
| Astrological attribution | Taurus | 1888 CE |