10/1/12—Carrying Hierophant Energy

Today's Draw: The Hierophant from the Margarete Petersen Tarot. Do you consider yourself religious or spiritual or both? What do you see as the distinction between spirituality and religion? Do you feel you embody the spirit of the Hierophant?

In many tarot decks this card is represented by a priest of some sort. In fact, in some decks the name of this card is The Pope. So the meaning of the card lends itself to traditional, even dogmatic, teachings of the church. It can also speak to the ceremonies performed by priests, such as weddings and baptisms. For the most part, it's a card of conformity, suggesting a relationship with god based on scripture. 

But that's not really how I read it. More often than not, I read this card to be more about spirituality than religion...more about the relationship you have with god based on your own knowing. That's how I see the difference between spirituality and religion. It's all in your point of reference. If you're learning about god from scripture and traditional teachings, it's religion. If you're learning from within—from your personal relationship with god—it's spirituality.

This particular Hierophant card is non-traditional and it seems to align with the way I prefer to tread this card. It shows a mystical kind of creature working its way through a mysterious room using light that seems to emanate from the palm of his hand. 

The tarot people out there are probably thinking about The Hermit card right now, which is about separating yourself from life to seek within. The guy in that card sets off into nature with a lantern, much like in this image. And that parallel makes sense to me because we search within to find our own higher self. And we search within to find our spiritual version of god. 

Some would say our higher self and god are one in the same. And the progression that happens between the Hierophant, card #5 and the Hermit, card #9 is that the search for god shifts from looking outside of you to know him/it to looking inside you. 

When you see god as being inside you, you begin to accept that everything that happens serves god. And everything that happens serves your highest good, too. God isn't doing something TO you...he's doing something FOR you. That's part of the shift. It's hard to see that when you're standing in the middle of a crap sandwich, but understanding it and trusting it would save you a lot of suffering. Which is one of the things the book for this deck says about the Hierophant...that it's about transforming suffering into knowing.

When we look back on the pains and losses of our lives, we see how everything led to the person we are today. And chances are we wouldn't trade even the worst of those happenings for the lessons and growth we got from them. The things we would change are probably ones we're still so emotionally tied to that we can't see the value in them. Life has taught us this lesson about how everything that happens to us has divine reasons over and over again. Yet every time we're in the midst of crisis, we doubt it.

Hierophant energy is about transforming suffering into knowing before the suffering takes hold. It's about trusting in god's wisdom enough to not question it every time we don't like the way it looks. It's about understanding that crappy things don't happen to you to make you victim. Rather they happen to you because god or the universe loves you enough to give you the information and opportunity you need to move closer to source. 

Suffering is a choice you make based on your separation from source. Understanding is a choice you make based on your union with it.