The Power to Bind and Harmonize: The Hierophant in the Tarot

(Based on the representations found on the Rider-Waite-Smith deck.)

In ancient Greece, the Hierophant guarded the secret rites of the cult of Demeter and Persephone. Known as the Eleusinian Mysteries, the annual initiation celebrated the descent of Demeter into the underworld, as well as her return. The powerful symbolic union between mother and daughter was said to have “provided initiates with a vision of the afterlife so powerful that it changed the way they saw the world and their place in it.” Greeks and Romans traveled to…