V  Wisdom

The Hierophant, the traditional tarot card that Wisdom replaces, has also, over time, been called The Pope. The meaning of the card is of a connector between "God" and "Man," a spiritual go-between, as it were. There was no place in this deck for a man in woman's attire stepping between anyone and their sense of an overlighting Divinity of any sort, nebulous or defined.

The old Hierophant card represented for me much of  what is out of balance in the world, the concept that only men are fit to attain exalted positions of power, the fact that there even are exalted positions of power, the idea that if you maintain a god concept then you need someone to interpret that god for you, never mind the sheer idiocy that wearing a dress somehow connects you to the feminine.

Wisdom pays homage to that which we all carry within us, knowingness. Knowingness is different from knowing. To know something is to have an intellectual grasp of a concept. It is being able to wrap your mind around something. Knowingness is something born of the cellular consciousness of your Body, it is an instinctual, archival, integral awareness of rightness, wrongness, veracity or mendacity of things. We all have knowingness. Most of us are separated from it by the processes of socialization necessary to keep us in line as very young children.

When a child's mother is cold, she bundles her child up. Never mind that the child may not be cold, may even be quite comfortable, may even be warm, resistance will not be tolerated. Mother is cold, child will dress to match her needs. Over time such simple, well-meaning gestures murder knowingness as we all learn to do not what feels right but what we are told is right. Most of us have to consciously set aside time as adults to reclaim our knowingness.

Wisdom is the happy combination of heart and head, of the knowingness of the Body working with the intellect. When V, Wisdom appears in a reading it is as a symbol of your own knowingness or of a need to find it.