He raises a hand in blessing over two acolytes. Where the High Priestess withholds, the Hierophant teaches: the established way, the answers of people who went first, the things you get by being taught.
This card usually means you do not need to invent it yourself. You are redesigning something a hundred people have already solved, or you are not asking someone who would simply tell you. It asks you to swallow the pride and follow the existing method once. Breaking the form keeps just fine until after you have learned it.
It is also the card of paperwork and proper channels — contracts, licences, registering the thing, getting real advice. When it lands on a point you were planning to wave through, read it as: do not wave this through.
Reversed, only the shell is left. Everyone does it this way and nobody remembers why. Or the opposite — you are skipping steps that exist for a reason. The test that separates them: if this rule vanished, who would be worse off? If nobody, it is ritual. If someone, it was load-bearing.
There is a habit of reading the Hierophant as stuffy and old. But the tradition it names is not old so much as already tested. It appears where a road exists — built by people who went through it first — and you are insisting on starting from scratch. The card asks whether you have turned learning into a question of pride.
Beside the Fool it becomes a fork between following the taught path and starting from nothing. With the Devil it often points at a relationship or organisation where only the form is left. The Hierophant is about belonging, so it reads more easily once you ask where you belong.