Make the Mundane Magical

Or, how not to hate the Hierophant card

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I filled my home with pink roses for this New Moon in Cancer in honor of Aphrodite. Darling little spray roses from Trader Joe’s are perfectly sized (and priced) for just such a magical homage, although my index finger did manage to find the one stray thorn still left on a stem. It reminded me that even Golden Aphrodite, goddess of beauty and pleasure with the power to attract all the good and lovely things in the universe, still had her moments of spite and not-so-good will.

Well played, Aphrodite.

For this week’s newsletter, I’d like to explore this notion of magic and ritual through something I wrote over a year ago about the Hierophant card - a tarot card that I hope to crack open and expand for you.

Let me know what you think!

The Hierophant is the Brussels sprouts of tarot.

You only think you hate it because you haven’t had it served properly.

If you are not from the U.S. and/or are too young to have grown up with Brussels sprouts being the nation’s icon of unappealing food, allow me to explain.

Picture it: Home kitchens throughout the United States, anywhere between, oh I don’t know, the 1930s and the 1980s. Women in kitchens all over the country were unimaginatively boiling Brussels sprouts in lightly salted water, not knowing that overcooking these cruciferous vegetables is precisely what releases the hydrogen sulfide within, causing that signature stinkiness that emanates through the house and serves as the most unappetizing fanfare to an equally unappetizing serving of vegetables.

But I am here to tell you that if you halve the sprouts, spread them out on a baking sheet with diced pancetta, drizzle them generously with olive oil, salt, and pepper, roast them at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes so that the outer leaves crisp up and begin to shed, and then - right before serving - dramatically toss them in some balsamic vinegar before bringing them to the table, you will be asked to make Brussels sprouts for every single Thanksgiving meal you ever attend for the rest of your adult life.

In other words, so many of us have been traumatized by religion that is stuffy and bland at best and offensive and even abusive at worst that the religious iconography of the Hierophant card causes us to recoil.

Tarot is rife with Christian imagery and symbolism. And the Hierophant is perhaps the most obvious example. (In the Tarot de Marseilles, this card is even called the Pope.) But when we are dealing with archetypes, symbolism, and myth - as we do in tarot - we aren’t supposed to interpret the images literally.

So the Hierophant doesn’t have to have anything to do with religion if you don’t want it to!

Like any other figure in the tarot, the Hierophant is an archetype: an abstract, even idealized version of a character or concept that exists in our shared, or collective, unconscious. And if we approach the Hierophant card in this abstract way, we get some kind of spiritual leader or advisor before whom two supplicants, or followers, have come to kneel for guidance or perhaps a blessing. So, when we draw the Hierophant in a tarot reading, it could represent any type of spiritual guidance, advisement, or mentorship. If that’s a priest or rabbi for you, great. But if not, that’s okay too! Maybe it’s a teacher, writer, or community activist. Maybe it’s your favorite spiritual podcaster or yoga instructor. Or your grandmother!

(Of course, the Hierophant, like any other tarot card, is quite complex and we are looking at just one facet today. Sometimes when we draw this card we are being called to “be” the Hierophant archetype ourselves. We are asked, how can we share our knowledge or expertise in a manner that lights the way for others? But in my experience, that interpretation is not usually the one that makes us uncomfortable. It’s when we identify more with the supplicants that our arm hairs bristle.)

But what if we get really wild and take this abstraction one step further? Maybe the Hierophant card doesn’t have to represent a person at all.

(The image above, by the way, is of the Hierophant card from The Radiant Tarot. Also, my dog Jagger.)

In Tarot and the Archetypal Journey, Sallie Nichols points out that the Hierophant card is the first time we see any humans other than the namesake of the tarot card. That is, in the five cards that precede the Hierophant in the Major Arcana, we get just the figure for which the card is named and nobody else. In Nichols’ words, in the Hierophant card, “for the first time, humanity confronts the archetype.” The Hierophant, then, up on his pedestal, glowing with divine light, is “the bridge between dogma and experience, between the code and its practical application.”

Not necessarily a person, but a bridge!

So, if a spiritual advisor of any kind is no more comforting or appealing a character to you than a more traditionally “religious” leader, maybe the interpretation of the Hierophant we need is that of a bridge to something divine, inexplicable, and greater than ourselves. Whatever that may be!

I love the term bridge for the Hierophant. And I’ll admit I’ve never really thought of the Hierophant in this way before! Have you? It’s my tarot life card (I’m a life path number five) and I’ve been perfectly happy saying, “Yup, a teacher, a thought leader, a translator of esoteric wisdom. Sounds just like me!”

I mean, have you met me? So smart. So wise. So modest.

But I’ve been thinking about this bridge concept all week. In fact, I am typing this bit after randomly watching Eat Pray Love on Netflix for the first time in over a decade, and at the end, Julia Roberts playing Liz Gilbert finally chooses the Italian “attraversiamo” as the word to most accurately describe her life. (She and her European friends had been mulling it over earlier in the movie but she had said “writer” and her European friends were all like, “That’s your occupation, you dumb American! That’s not who you are!” And she, a forlorn workaholic capitalist who had been taught from an early age that her worth as a human is best measured by the commercial value of the work she produces, gave a classic Julia Roberts deer-in-headlights stare as she attempted to ponder what these playboy Europeans could possibly be on about as we cut to the next scene.) Attraversiamo is Italian for “let’s cross over,” literally from one side of the street to another, but figuratively from one phase of life to another, or from one mindset or perspective to another.

And what helps us cross over? A bridge.

Marcus Katz and Tali Goodwin in Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot call the Hierophant a “connection between one world and another, between our inner life and our outer life, the divine and the mundane.”

In other words, a bridge.

They also characterize the Hierophant tarot card as a “cosmic interface.”

In other words, a bridge.

And, if I may bring it back to religion for a second, if you grew up Catholic or Orthodox (Armenian Orthodox in my case), the very purpose of the tradition and opulence of church - reflected in the Hierophant card - is to bridge our world with the divine, mystical one. In Armenian Orthodox churches, for example, the priests wear ornate robes in rich reds and deep purples (and even a quite snazzy peacock blue number for my nephew’s baptism that lives rent-free in my mind to this day). They swing around jangly, gold thuribles filled with frankincense, which remains my incense of choice at home because it’s so ingrained in my Armenian culture as a sensory bridge to the divine and spirit world. Sunlight pours in through intricate stained glass windows. And dozens of white prayer candles melted down to various heights adorn the corners of the nave. All of these traditions and rituals act as bridges and help us MAKE THE MUNDANE MAGICAL.

To conclude, the Hierophant card can be seen as some kind of bridge between the mundane and the magical, the material and the mythical, and - if I can squeeze just a little more juice out of this masterful alliteration - between the monotonous and the mystical.

So let me ask you: Who or what in your life serves as this bridge, or connection, for you? Who, what, or perhaps even where reminds you of this bridge between magic and the mundane?

To add to whatever wonderful responses just came to your mind, here’s a tarot spread I created exclusively for you. I call it the Mundane to Magic Tarot Spread.