Although the road ahead may be rough and fraught with unforseen peril, your fortitude will carry you. The lessons and dogma you bring will serve to guide as well as blind you to your own abilities for free thinking. Feeling stripped of power and stuck in your own mire, you do not see a clear path to change your circumstance and you're fearful of takiing a leap into the now unknown.
The Bonefire Knight of Swords travels a rough road, but one I think which is of his own making, He is intelligent and full of purpose, but without the discipline to hold it in check. So, he starts out on his path riding a just as unbroke and undisciplined horse who tries to buck him off every chance he gets. The trip starts out on the wrong foot and will likely continue the same way for sometime. The Knight is stubborn to a fault and will keep pushing on, against the wind, against the stream, and uphill all the way.
Add to this mind set the unyielding thought processes of the institutions the Knight has been trained in. Although the Knight knows the rules and regulations taught by the scholars and those in authority are there for the greater good, it never occurred to him to question the reason, fairness, or practicality of those lessons, accepting them without question. As we start out as children being tought by our parents and teachers we accept these teachings as absolutes. If you were brought up as I was, there are no grey areas, no bending the rules with very few exceptions.
As we grow older we begin to question these lessons of the past and learn there is a time and place to bend these rules and question authority, no longer blindly following as sheep. And sometimes we find ourselves up a tree without a ladder or net. The Bonefire Four of Coins shows a man in a tree and he looks miserable. The man has climbed into the tree as he pursued his dreams. Then inexplicably he finds he has reached a branch that he cannot easily decend from. As he climbed he acquired the things he wanted and more. Now, he has trapped himself and isn’t sure how he can extract himself from the tree, but also the extras he has attained and no longer needs or wants. He’s in a different place on his life path and no longer needs to climb the tree for a bigger view.
The Hierophant is not usually a card I see in my readings, and I don’t have much use for it either. The Bonefire Heirophant though in today’s reading reminds me to always question the status quo, to be more objective and to exercise my ability for free thinking. As long as I can think I can dream, as long as I can dream I can imagine and in imagineing I can come up with a plan of action to free myself from my tree.