Aspect Spotlight: The Hierophant

This post is part of a series focusing on the eight Aspects—the “playbooks” of Divination if you will. Learn how each one represents its tarot card in the Hero’s psyche and how it plays, including a spotlight on a couple Powers for each one. The entire series is linked at the bottom of the page.

The Hierophant is the reassuring truth that wise people lived before you did and wrote down their best ideas, and the refinement of that process created the body of knowledge you live in without questioning.

The Hierophant is also the demand built into the accumulation of knowledge: you have to protect, maintain, and serve any institution that houses it.

If you do, you can create something lasting that improves the human experience for those it touches. You create schools, hospitals, traditions, faiths, sciences, trades.

These are all ladders made of humankind’s cumulative successes and failures. Every one of them can be used to climb during one’s lifetime, and every climber is invited to add rungs.

The Hierophant is both legacy and inheritance. He’s both service and solace. He’s a structure that keeps the rain off your head and support in your life, but will also demand that you maintain and contribute to it.

The Hierophant is the only Aspect depicted by Pixie with followers in the foreground. Leading others is built into the Aspect in the same way that minimizing contact with others is built into the Hermit.

When you play the Hierophant, you pick a notion of service: an ideal. Whether that means you’re actively part of an institution or not, you serve it and enjoy its protections and benefits.

You may prioritize finding and recruiting others that share that ideal with you, instilling an instinct to build and serve in them to match yours. You may be a natural leader, with a voice that inspires or a demeanor that calms.

Or perhaps your ideal will compel you to forge a more solitary path, enjoying your connection to the miraculous; guarding and guiding others as Fate leads you into their lives with the knowledge that if you serve them, they’ll build the institution you may never.

Your Powers access the divine and inspire others. With Well of Spirit, you may trust faith to solve problems you cannot. You’ll redraw a card and trust in faith to lead you to success.

With Divine Blessings, you imbue an NPC with protective force—for them and for you.

The Hand of the Hierophant allows you to operate better in the face of danger—you are the emissary of an ideal on a mission, after all. You will reduce Risk on Tests, making them easier to undertake.

With Mellifluous Voice, you’ll gain the charisma you need to lead others to your ideal, while you’re in Control.

You may use Crossed Keys to replenish your Powers based on how much you’ve learned lately (literally, how many unspent Potential you’re carrying). The more you grow, the further you can push yourself.

As the Hierophant, your Powers are designed to allow you to lead, inspire, and encourage the Hero to grow through service and dedication. You don’t do this for ambition, like the Magician, and don’t do it to create a community of followers or family members like the Empress or the Emperor.

You serve because the ideal was here before you got here, and will outlast you. The world improves through the efforts of people like you, building ladders that point skyward toward that ideal in their lifetime, so that others can benefit from more accumulated wisdom in theirs.

Read about the other Aspects here: