The Hierophant
Trump V of the tarot: a priest in a triple crown between two pillars. Older decks called him the Pope.
Meaning
Waite's Hierophant wears the triple crown, holds a sceptre ending in a triple cross, and gives a blessing with his right hand, with crossed keys at his feet and two priests kneeling before him. Waite noted that the card "has been usually called the Pope", and read him as the ruling power of outward religion, where the High Priestess stands for the hidden one.
Waite's meanings
Waite gave the card "marriage, alliance, captivity, servitude" and "mercy and goodness; inspiration"; reversed, "society, good understanding, concord, overkindness, weakness".
In older decks
A nineteenth-century Milanese pack in the British Museum titles the card Il Papa. Papus, calling it the Pope, joined it to the fifth Hebrew letter, He.
Read next
- Next in Tarot cardsThe LoversTrump VI of the tarot: two lovers beneath a winged figure. A. E. Waite read it as attraction, love and beauty.
- The same shape in Chinese radicalsMù 目The character for ‘eye’, and radical 109 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for looking and seeing are filed.
See also
The High Priestess, The Fool, The Magician, The Empress, The Emperor, The Chariot.
Sources
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A. E. Waite, William Rider & Son, London, 1910 (the sacred-texts.com transcription, on the Internet Archive), The Trumps Major; The Greater Arcana and their Divinatory Meanings
- The Tarot of the Bohemians, by Papus, Chapman & Hall, London, 1896, translated by A. P. Morton (scan on the Internet Archive), The Symbolical Tarot
- A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and Other Cards in the British Museum, by W. H. Willshire, Trustees of the British Museum, London, 1876 (scan on the Internet Archive), Italian tarots, second quarter of the nineteenth century, Milan
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from letters and numbers, lines or squares and rectangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 27, 2026. How we research
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