Within the depth-psychology corpus, the Hierophant operates across two distinct but convergent registers: the historical-cultic and the symbolic-psychological. In the first register, classical scholars such as Burkert and the Jung–Kerényi collaboration situate the hierophant as the hereditary sacral functionary of the Eleusinian Mysteries — the one who, literally, ‘reveals the sacred,’ completing initiation amid fire, opening the Anaktoron, and mediating the supreme vision or epopteia to initiates. Burkert attends to the ritual mechanics: the fire, the Anaktoron, the sacred marriage question, and the hierophant’s genealogical lineage from Eumolpos. Jung and Kerényi underscore the transformative function — the hierophant’s revelation as the axis upon which the entire telos of the mysteries turned. In the second register, Edinger reformulates the priest-hierophant as a depth-psychological archetype within the therapeutic relationship, distinguishing it from the ordinary priest by its mystery-context and its capacity to mediate theophany — the transformative encounter with the transpersonal. Tarot commentators including Pollack, Hamaker-Zondag, and Banzhaf translate the figure into the fifth trump of the Major Arcana, where it embodies Jung’s religious function, the transmission of collective tradition, and — in its shadow — the corruption of institutional authority into mere obedience-demanding power. The term thus anchors a tension central to depth psychology: between transmitted religious structure and living transformative experience.