Read more: The Hierophant: interpreting Life Lessons through timing & tarot

I never thought we’d venture down tarot cards on this blog, but here we are. And after the weekend I’ve had? The Hierophant is the first installment on our Tarot journey.

The Hierophant is an educator, a lesson personified. He represents values and knowledge; but he also represents institutions and tradition. A myriad of sites will deliver their own interpretations, but I inform my perception through Light Seer Tarot and the Wild Unknown decks.

Through the lens of the Wild Unknown’s Hierophant, the cawing raven delivers a message. It is not gentle or soft, as heralding by the lighting flashes over his head, but clear. As strong and calamitous as any storm. It’s almost as though the Raven is trying to warn you, to prepare you for whatever comes next. It is instructing you.

The  Hierophant is traditionally a mentor or teacher, and associated with Taurus. Taurus is stubborn, immovable, and distinctly associated with earth – but he still teaches. He sees and he warns with the keenness and urgency of the Raven in the Wild Unknown deck. But the Hierophant has another side, too. A side that takes his lesson in stride, in a gentler way. A spiritual way.

Which is exactly what the Light Seer deck shows. It shows a Yogi master at the bottom of a set of stairs. He laughs – wide as open as the Wild Unknown’s raven – in the face of his lesson. He communicates less of a warning and more of a revelation, an “Oh, I see!” He embraces the lesson from within gently, from a place of peace at the bottom of mother’s nature’s staircase and declares his intentions to the world. He is humble and humored by his knowingness. The soft yellow and oranges of optimism and the emotionally charged pinks surround him.

Similarly, both decks use yellow and orange in their interpretations. The Wild Unknown uses it strikingly, in the tradition of lighting up the sky during thunderstorms; but the Light Seer uses it spiritually, gently. Soft as a calling.

These two decks create a contrast in how a lesson is delivered. Which, honestly, is on par with the universe’s humor – some lessons land as harshly as the bleating raven while others carry the floating ease of a self-revelation. Personally, I’ve experienced both – in the span of a weekend.

My best friend came to town and, like all our adventures, we packed as much as we could into our time together. That included a whirlwind whisk around the Basin in Washington, D.C. for the Cherry Blossom festival. In one way, it was ironic, as our friendship solidified at the Cherry Blossom festival two years prior. We were virtually strangers then. So young. One of the pictures we took together this time struck me: we were more mature this time, secure in ourselves in a way we never were before. You could see the lessons of time in our stance, in our faces. We laughed in the photo as my dog, Rosie, trundled past, toward the Basin bracken water. But we remained – older, standing, secure.

I had lost my sister shortly before the last Cherry Blossom Festival we attended, circa 4 years ago. The solo picture I’d taken there showed a younger me wizened by grief. Grief had placed so many lines on my face and soul; lines that felt like prison bars. My skin cried with the harsh lesson of the Wild Unknown’s raven. 

But this festival’s picture? It showed a different lesson. One that laughed in the face of all that had passed and all that would pass. Eventually, it would echo into the boundaries I would set for the week ahead and the removal of certain emotions and people in my life. All at once, with a gentleness, the lesson from within rose to the surface. It wasn’t immediately as funny and enlightening as the deck and picture show, but I got there eventually. I sat there – fresh from ending a situation I had allowed to go on for too long – and laughed. At the revelation, the lesson, and the theatricality of it all (a story that will later show its face on here, I’m sure). 

But I arrived at the top of that staircase. Between the years, I had experienced the sharpness of the Hierophant and its easy revelation. I had winced under sharp cries and laughed under its gentle ebbs. A story had played out and at the center of it all was the lesson of the Hierophant: No matter how knowledge finds you – from outside or within – it is within your power to interpret it. It can drain you or scare you with its abruptness, or it can resonate gently from within.

The choice is yours.

And time, as always, may make that choice for you, should you unduly delay.

Choose wisely. Choose boldly.

Choose to laugh in the easy, intuitive way the Hierophant knows.

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