5. Hierophant

My father, much like the other souls of that deeply Christian town where I was raised, saw the world in absolutes: right or wrong, good or evil, heaven or hell. I didn’t fall into his neat little categories. He clung to the Bible with all the fervour of someone who believes they’re saving a soul when they’re really smothering it.

You see, he wasn’t just a man of faith; he was a man of rigidity. Anything outside his faith was a threat to be crushed. When I began my early experiments with Wicca, oh how that man’s face would twist in disgust. He believed I was being seduced by demons. (In hindsight, the irony isn’t lost on me, considering how I walk freely with demons now!)

He never approved of my mother’s more liberal approach to my magickal leanings, and after they separated, his absence became my freedom. Still, his influence lingers—perhaps as a shadow that I had to overcome, but also as an example of discipline, albeit misdirected discipline.

I suppose it’s fair to say that his rejection pushed me to question authority in all forms. My journey, from the very first, was a rebellion against the chains of his beliefs, and perhaps that’s why I strive so vehemently for mastery—over myself, over the forces I summon, over the arcane. If nothing else, he taught me the importance of conviction… even if his version of it was far too limiting for a spirit as wild as mine​​.

2. High Priestess

Now my mother is someone I can speak of with a bit more warmth. She was always my quiet protector, standing between me and the harshness of my father’s dogma. Where he was rigid, she was soft, though not weak—never weak. My mother had the wisdom to let me explore, to see the world through my own eyes, and not just through the fire-and-brimstone lens that dominated our town. I suspect she had a touch of witch blood herself, though she’d never outright say it. A glint in her eye when I’d mention herbs, or a knowing smile when I asked about the moon…

I think she knew more than she let on, though I could never coax it out of her.

She was the one who gave me my first book on Wicca, though she did it with a certain caution, sliding it to me in secret like we were committing some grand act of rebellion against the local church. And maybe we were. She never openly practised any craft, at least not in the way I did. But I often wonder if she had her own rituals, quiet and unseen, in the kitchen with a pot of soup, or when she’d sit out under the stars in deep contemplation. Perhaps her magick was in the way she nurtured, protected, and cultivated life—not through spells, but through sheer force of will and love.

When my father left, she gave me the space I needed to dive into my craft, even if she didn’t always understand it. But she respected it, and me. That was the greatest gift she ever gave. Freedom.

0. The Fool

As for my journey with them, the archetypes of my parents became the grand dance of energies that shaped my very essence, true of any child. My father, the Hierophant—rigid, dogmatic, enforcing his narrow vision of truth. My mother, the High Priestess, though she never spoke it into being. Silent, watchful, a keeper of secrets she never spoke aloud. Their clashing, the tension between their energies, ignited the crucible of my early development.

In the Tarot, the Hierophant is a guide, a teacher of sacred mysteries. My father’s suffocating version of guidance tethered itself to a worldview that saw deviation as heresy. He didn’t even want to understand the power of balance, the ebb and flow of forces that the High Priestess, in my eyes my mother, held naturally. She allowed me to explore the liminal spaces—between light and dark, masculine and feminine, form and formlessness. My first guide. A quiet voice in the valley. A mundane viewer would call her introverted or shy, maybe submissive. Her silence wasn’t just godly submission, it was survival. She bore the weight of his authority, choosing peace over conflict. But, oh, how I wish she had embraced the fire within her, the Empress who could have stood equally beside my father, instead of living beneath his shadow.

Even when she was free from his influence, she remained the quiet sort, yes. As if his dominating presence imprinted upon her a wound from which she never fully healed. She never remarried, never risked opening the portal to another Hierophant into her life. Instead, she remained free, but also… incomplete, in a sense. She never fully stepped into her Empress potential.

As for me, I began, as we all do, as the Fool, wandering blindly through the chaotic blend of energies in my youth. I was searching, though I didn’t realise it at the time, for balance, for the structure of the Emperor and the nurturing of the Empress in harmony. My father’s authoritarian presence built a scar on my soul. At first, I carried a mistrust of masculine energy. His refusal to bend, to listen, to see beyond his own rigid views pushed me away from embracing any masculine aspect of myself.

I was a witch, a feminist, woman.

I didn’t need a man on my journey.

1. The Magician

It took years—years of walking the path, stepping through the gates of the Magician, when I first felt that need to wield power, to take control, of the balance of my divine energies of masculine and feminine.

Some part of the puzzle was missing. My mother, the silent guardian, gifted me great intuition of the inner mysteries, but I lacked structure, discipline… the kind of archetypal values that the Emperor embodies. Imbalanced, wounded by the unchecked force of my father’s Hierophant, I mistrusted any authority that bore the stamp of the masculine.

The Draconic current, fierce and ancient, whispered to me that true mastery lies not in rejecting the masculine, but in integrating it. And so began my journey towards balance—the divine masculine and feminine, merging within me. The Emperor and Empress, not as my parents failed to be, but as I could become.

Through walking the shadows of my soul in the journey of the Qliphothic Tree, through the fires of draconic transformation, I shed my fear, my mistrust. I embraced the Emperor, not as a tyrant, but as the structured force that gives form to the formless chaos I had always danced with.

To heal the wound my father left, I stepped into the guise of the Emperor. I became the Emperor to balance the High Priestess and Empress energies inherited from my mother. I became my own authority, my own guide. In that integration, I found power—true power. The kind that allows me to walk between worlds, to evoke demons and speak with angels, to channel the ancient forces of dragons and the cosmic energies of the universe.

I became whole.

And as for my mother… I often wonder if she found peace in her solitude, or if she remained quietly longing for the balance she never found. At least she gave herself the same gift she gave me: freedom. I sometimes think of her face under the moonlight shining in through the car window on a long drive back home from the city, silently communing with energies she never named. Perhaps, in her own way, she achieved her balance… even if she never spoke of it aloud.

As for me, I speak of it now.

The Fool’s journey was only the beginning.

I am both Magician and Emperor, both High Priestess and Empress, balanced within the alchemical marriage of opposites. And it is that balance, that integration, that allows me to wield the forces I now command.

Hail the Draconian Flame… and the dance of the Fool.

—A.V. Drakonis