Seeking Spirit (The Hierophant)

This week, with the merciless death of George Floyd, and this year, with failed governance leading to over 100,000 deaths from Covid, reveal how much has been lost, how far we the people have strayed from our better selves.

I’ve never been a fan of religious hierarchy, although I certainly participated in it for decades. The Smith-Waite Hierophant …

recalled my own experience of a man who, when asked back in the 70s why women couldn’t be priests, self-righteously declared that God would never call a woman to the priesthood as he had been.

“How do you know?” I asked. When no good answer was forthcoming, “How could he know?” stayed with me forever after. And in time women were ordained and the church was often the better for their presence.

So, I hung with organized religion, because I do believe in spirit and often found it in music, in service, and in the Cursillo community. But in the end, it was self-righteous clergy (some, certainly not all), who drove me to look for answers elsewhere.

• 78 Degrees: The Hierophant [can be] the spirit that runs through all our lives
• Kitchen Table Tarot: an archivist and a librarian … using old knowledge … [to create] a pathway to our most authentic lives
• The Creative Tarot: we need to step up … be of service … come together as a group to create something larger … to unearth our higher selves

For me, now, spirit is best found in the land and expressed symbolically. Opening the box of bookcovers, these images flew out …

Buffalo, sacred to Native Americans, representing spirit … the church representing the structure of Christianity imposed on the Native American belief system … beneath it all, a tangled web … and light, always there is light …

if only we can find our way to it.