The Hierophant

Struck is working with inherited systems (oracles, signs, traditions) and arguing they weren’t just “superstition,” but culturally and philosophically meaningful frameworks. That’s Hierophant: tradition as a container for wisdom. A Hierophant reading is also about initiation into a way of reading the world. The oracle isn’t valuable because it spits out “answers”; it’s valuable because it teaches a community how to make meaning when certainty is impossible. In the talk’s frame, divination becomes a disciplined interpretive act: you consult signs, you hold ambiguity, you test resonance, you translate symbol into guidance. That’s the Hierophant as interpreter...the one who helps turn mystery into something you can live by. It also matters who is delivering the message. Struck stands in a modern analog of the Hierophant role...the scholar/teacher who legitimizes an old practice by locating it in its historical context and showing the audience the “grammar” of how it worked. The vibe is: you don’t have to be naïve to take this seriously; you just have to understand what kind of seriousness it is. That’s Hierophant: not “believe blindly,” but “learn the tradition’s operating system.” And finally, the Hierophant is the card of shared containers: rituals, institutions, cultural memory...structures that hold people steady when life gets weird. This talk lands right there: when modern rationality hits its limit, humans don’t stop needing guidance; we reach for frameworks that can hold uncertainty without collapsing. Struck is basically reintroducing divination as one of humanity’s longstanding “containers” for that moment.