The HIEROPHANT is the earthly attendant of the greatest of all mothers, the Goddess, though he is not a god himself. He is rather more of a threshold figure, betwixt and between the here and now and the potential of what you can be. He is connected with rejuvenation, in charge of maintaining balance. A leader of souls, a psychopomp, he travels through your dreams.
The Hierophant is also known far and wide as a cross-dressing gypsy priest. He offers initiation, an opening to adventure, the means to a passage beyond the veil of the limits of ordinary things.
His name itself belonged to the high priests of the Mystery Religions as they were practiced in ancient Greece. The early Greek geographer, Strabo, identified the Hierophant as transvestites presiding over the Mysteries of the goddess Hecate. They were also the cross-dressing Megabyzos of the goddess Artemis at Ephesos, and, elsewhere, in service of the goddess Aphrodite/Astarte. They were the most sacred of the cult of the Bee Kings, too, and, on the island of Paros, the Hierophant were known as the Orgeones, come from “a society of men” devoted to the goddess Demeter.
Known by other names in other zones, they were also by all accounts found. Indeed, as the early explorer Richard Burton so aptly wrote in his journals, “these people, functioning in connection with the magico-religious life, existed all over the world.” They were what we would now call gay - men called to the Goddess by their own experience of things.
The Mysteries were practiced for thousands of years prior to the Christian era, calling forth a secret known only to those who underwent a powerful initiatory rite. Indeed, Mysteries comes from the Greek work, mustes, which means an initiate, described as “one who saw the light.” It is in this power, based on the spiritual origins of humankind and in the context of ceremonial leadership, that the Hierophant’s respected status is known.
It’s been told the Greek mysteries began with the Hierophant leading the chants. Song led to dance and then jubilation, effecting renewal and transformation by way of a powerful spiritual rebirth. The most important phenomena perceived by the individual were treated as divine. It was expressed as nature-worship, including human nature, and nature was the world of the Goddess.
THE CULTS OF ZEUS
On the Island of Crete, there lived the Curetes or Curos, in later times called the Kuroi, mystical performers of a ritual dance in worship of a young vegetation god. Known by the "dark stories of male fertility," to quote a homophobic historian, the function of their gay dance was to bring about a transformation of consciousness. Some believe the Kuroi rites represented the first appearance of the Hierophant in the Mystery Religions themselves.
As the matriarchal cultures were engulfed by the historical patriarchal tide, the Crete islanders were conquered. The human dancing Kuroi were transformed into deities, first associated with the gay god Apollo, then the Horned God Dionysus, and finally as the attendants at the birth of Zeus himself. Indeed, Zeus, the "divine light" in the Greek pantheon, came to be known as the "Greatest of the Kuroi." From these beginnings came the Cults of Zeus in which the worshippers, like the Kuroi, came to feel themselves one with the cosmos as if struck by a thunderbolt. |
| |
Then came Emperor Constantine’s con- solidation of power and, in 324 A.D, the Roman Empire banned all beliefs and cults, save the Christian. Envisioned as Eve being booted out of the garden, the church eliminated the sacred feminine and they ran the Hierophant out of town. Or, rather, it was more that the church borrowed the rituals, plundered their symbols, and stole the Hierophant’s skirts, claiming them as their own. Failing that, they slaughtered the Goddesses’ followers wherever they were found. The Mysteries went underground.
Many traditional Tarot decks call this trump the Pope, depicting a man of stature and wisdom seated upon a throne. This church figure is tied to a repressive tradition of patriarchal authority and dogma, wherein religion becomes a heady thing about disembodied souls. The feminine, the body, the earth itself, are all considered vile and, in this diabolical scheme of things, to be gay is something worse. “Outside the church there is no salvation,” is the cornerstone of this belief - quite a blasphemous notion when it comes to THE GAY TAROT. |
Far from the puerile and puritanical preaching of the monotheistic, patriarchal beliefs, the Hierophant comes to religion the old fashioned way - by way of direct experience - when the mystical meaning of the Mysteries are revealed in the form of sacred, inner secrets rising from within one’s self. He is depicted in THE GAY TAROT standing at the gateway to this other world. He does not block the road. Unlike those so eager to escape their bodies and live through what they envision as their souls, the Hierophant offers another way whereby the body becomes the temple to experience the Mysteries themselves. The distinction between this and traditional Tarot cannot be more pronounced.
The entryway is marked with ancient symbols for both the feminine and masculine principles - the downward facing chalice and the upward facing blade. The blade, a crude phallus, is representative of the male initiating force - what we might call, today, a “top.” The chalice, the all-containing female - or “bottom” in the gay lexicon - denotes the goal towards which the Hierophant leads the flock: the spirit every where present, the land of the Goddess, the future, the great unknown itself.
Tattooed on his upper arm is found a thunderbolt. It’s a powerful symbol to rock your world, come from the ancient dancing Kuroi who formed the Cults of Zeus. The thunderbolt, as cosmic force, is what the Hierophant is all about. In his left hand he holds a string of bells, again symbolizing his consort, the Goddess, and the sounds of harmony and bliss. He’s surrounded by other ceremonial objects, as well – his drum and rattles and other power objects bedecked with the imprints of supernatural creatures and helpers from the fairy realms. And at his feet you’ll find a Horned God’s antler, a cornucopia spilling forth with Eve’s freshly harvested apples – a taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, the bounty of life itself.
The Hierophant is at the same time both the Sun and the Moon, the Magician and the High Priestess, symbols for which are found dangling from his beard. They are once again drawn from the Mysteries, representing both the exoteric outer way and the esoteric inner way to a new experience of things. That is, each tradition had Outer Mysteries, consisting of myths and rituals that were part of the order of the everyday outer world - like blessing your meal before you chow down or sprinkling corn dust to the dawn. And then there were the Inner Mysteries, known to the initiates only, whereby the secrets behind the Outer ways actually come alive.
Whether traveling the outer road or the inner path, initiation can take many forms. For gay men in our modern world it can perhaps most readily be understood through homosexual awakening, the process of what we call “coming out.” Growing up gay in a non-gay world, we learn to see reality through the distortions of a heterosexual lens, in the way that it was modeled by our parents, taught to us by our teachers, and enforced by our friends. What’s called for is an act of liberation, a means to begin to free ourselves from the internalized influences of the dominant and often homophobic mores. Initiation marks this change of status, and sexual rites of passage are a distinct form of ritual to effect this new birth taking form.
Initiation is at once a sign of spirituality, of commerce with gods and spirits, and a source of sacred power. That first, fortunate time when we find ourselves in the arms of another man, we are offered such an opportunity, finally, to merge our bodies with our souls, to fully experience both the feminine chalice and the masculine blade, freely changing roles. Embracing our own unique sense of identity, our own instincts, our own emotional and sexual selves - whether the non-gay majority approves of it or not - we thus cross the Hierophant’s threshold, set on the road to assuming full status within a new, more affirmative group. It provides a healthier sense of identity; as well as internal structure and balance, with the concomitant ability to |
|
Humorous vase painting depiciting Zeus, thunderbolt at the ready, in search of an initiate, c. 500 B.C. |
more fully participate in intimate relatedness to others, including a rightful experience of the divinity of homosexual behavior itself.The Hierophant leads the way. He is a guiding light who offers entry by way of activating inner forces. To cross his threshold is the first step in reclaiming one’s own power. Indeed, “power always seems to emerge from within ourselves, specifically through contact with the inner realms. Each of us is like a window, a walking portal. And when we discover the existence of the doorways within us, life becomes an incredibly enriched adventure.” 1 Or, in the words of THE GAY TAROT, once you taste the fruit of fairyland you never come back untransformed.
WHAT IT MEANS WHEN YOU GET THIS CARD
To reach this place is a common stop on the archetypal hero’s journey. To be sure, as the mythologist Joseph Campbell notes, “the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the ‘threshold guardian,’ found at the entrance to a zone of magnified power.” 2 It’s a burst of energy springing forth in service of something new taking form.
Ask yourself, what’s going on in your life, today? The suggestion here is that some sort of shift has already occurred, or is currently underway - some new way of looking at yourself and the world. It’s time to ground this understanding by taking steps to carve out a new life of your own. Embrace your own feelings, your own dreams, your own unique, authentic desires. Find ways to take new responsibility for your own experience of life. Others may be needed to help put this into action. For this you could possibly use a bit of the father of achievement, the Emperor in THE GAY TAROT. Perhaps you have already met a teacher, or guide, leading you on the path to charting your own course - an apprenticeship or training or some sort of new position that serves to better direct your life.
Like the Ugly Duckling in that great gay author’s, Hans Christian Anderson’s tale, you may yet have to undergo trials and tribulations before being greeted by the ancestors on the occasion of your own transformation into a swan. Nonetheless, you have made an auspicious start. Perseverance is required, for this may also be a time of purification in which certain negative aspects of your self - outdated attitudes, excuse making behaviors, troublesome relationship patterns, limiting self-concepts, or fears - are being faced and discarded.
REVERSED
The Hierophant reversed represents what gay-centered psychotherapists Jim Fickey and Gary Grimm write about as “the good boy” in their insightful book Gay Warrior. “The good boy is arguably… one of the main survival strategies that many of us learned early on in order to cope with an unsafe world… The good boy does what people tell him to do, thinks the way others want him to think. He follows the rules and acts obediently. He goes to great lengths to get people to like him – by being nice, polite, compliant, docile and well behaved.” 3 As Fickey and Grimm go on to note, “such an adaptive strategy, however understandable, carries a hefty price.”
The good boy, much like the reversed Hierophant, is turned all upside down. He has forgotten old gay Will Shakespeare’s adage, “to thine own self be true.” At bottom, this finds its roots in the patriarchal tradition of original sin as embodied by the Pope, “an underlying belief of being intrinsically bad – unworthy, flawed, wrong.” 4 Perhaps you are finding that you have reached the limits of such a perverted belief. Indeed, it’s a crossroads often marked by an increase in personal problems. Life can sometimes unravel in truly spectacular ways. Indeed, the law of karma does have a way of speeding the process of change. And so, no longer centered in the guidance rising from within yourself, it’s time for a bang upside the head – a whole new view of life.
On the more earthly plane, ask yourself, who or what are you drawing to yourself as either a source or a drain? It’s time for some sorting out. Search out the ways you have surrendered responsibility for truly finding your own way. Make changes accordingly.
It could also be as simple as the need to shake your rattles, dance all night, or just to go get laid. That’s not to say that simply getting into someone else’s pants solves all our problems, though it does help to put them in their proper place. Indeed, a good old nasty fuck can be a very powerful solvent, invariably leading closer to a meeting with and recognition of one’s own true Self.
Keep in mind that The Hierophant leads you to something better. Greater flexibility provides greater possibilities to discover alternative ways of seeing one’s self and the world.
CHAPTER FIVE NOTES
1. Campbell, Joseph. Hero with A Thousand Faces (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 1949), p. 246.
2. Ibid.
3. Fickey, F. Jim and Gary Grimm, Gay Warrior (San Francisco: GLB Publishers, 2002), p. 51
4. Ibid.
u Home
u The Book
u The Cards
u The Author
u Read A Sample Chapter
u Contact
u Subscribe For Updates |
