Teneice Durrant, creator of Tarot with Ten, uses various tarot and oracle decks to provide monthly readings for writers, with exercises on using imagery and intuition as prompts. June’s prompt is about developing a narrative of moving up the ranks.
Using tarot’s The Hierophant to develop a narrative of moving up the ranks
Watch and listen to Teneice's tarot reading for writers or read the transcript of the reading below.
Hi everyone, welcome to another edition of On Deck. This week, we are talking about the Hierophant, that is card number five. So we're on our sixth card for the sixth month of the year for June.
So let's talk about the Hierophant, what it represents, and how we can use it in our story. So the Hierophant has also been called the Pope. It represents structures, like institutions. It can represent religious institutions, but it can also represent like universities or the military or any place where, you know, like a company, any place where you work up the ranks to achieve the next level of knowledge, right? So if it's in the church, right, you start, I don't know, you know, the ranks, but you know, you start as maybe a deacon or whatever, you move up to a bishop and then a cardinal and then the pope, like there's a whole kind of tier, the system that they have in Catholicism. So that could be, you know, represented in education. It's like, you have high school, college, master's degree, doctoral degree, like that kind of leveling up, like more knowledge for every rank you go up.
In the military, you know, you start as like an airman, first class, and you work your way up to a staff sergeant or a captain or things like that. So this represents a system of knowledge where you kind of are initiated into the system by degrees, like you're learning step by step by step, and each step you gain some more knowledge.
Usually, there's like a couple people standing in for the Hierophant, you know, that represent like the students. So this is going to be like a master teacher or a master institution that is bestowing knowledge or secrets, hidden ways of doing things, on the chosen students, right? You can see here that we have these two keys crossed, and that kind of represents how learning in whatever capacity that you're in, learning is the key to unlocking these higher levels of wisdom or of spirituality or, you know, kind of attaining spaces and steps closer to, I guess, divinity or mastery of a subject or, you know, command of your unit or things like that. So it's kind of representing this movement upwards, but also kind of the removal of things, or people washing out, or people that are no longer able or interested in continuing.
So you can see on his hat and on his staff here, there's a large base, right? So a lot of people start, and then to get to the next step, some people are going to be weeded out. And then to get to the next step, even more people are going to be weeded out. So there's only a few people at the very top who possess all of the knowledge, okay, of that system.
So in our story, this can represent some kind of institution or schooling or, you know, some kind of training that our main character has to do. For example, like in Harry Potter, this would represent Hogwarts, you know, they have to go in their training, learning each year how to become better wizards, you know, just some kind of like a leveling up of achievement.
Okay, so let's get some cards and see if maybe we can come up with some ideas for our main character this week.
Like what kind of institution are they going into? Do they have a choice, or is this some kind of thing they're forced to do, like maybe their parents sign them up for something, or they get a traffic violation and they have to go to traffic school, or you know, it can be anything like that. So let's see what kind of cards we can get. We can create a little scenario for our main character to work with.
Okay, it looks like we're going to be talking about money and resources here. Let's take that one too. All right, so we have got our hierophant here, so this is going to represent some kind of systematical learning or something that our main character needs to do.
So then we have the Seven of Pentacles and the Ten of Pentacles, and then we'll kind of see what kind of like wrench gets thrown in, you know, to kind of surprise our main character.
Seven of Pentacles
So the seven of pentacles is really this card of like, the way one of my favorite readers calls it is, is the juice worth the squeeze, right? So is your time, is your investment, going to give you a good return, or would it be better to kind of scrap what you're doing and start over? Like you have to kind of decide where are you at in this process—are you going to get the yield from your crops that you need, or would it be better to just kind of turn the field over and plant something else that might kind of, you know, cancel out your losses? This is really a card of needing to decide if you're going to stick with what you started with, or if you've outgrown that and you need to move on to something else.
Ten of Pentacles
Okay, the Ten of Pentacles represents legacy, stability, generational wealth, creating a secure existence for your family.
This is also, like I said, generational wealth. So I like to think of this card as like, you know, like Beyonce's grandkids are already millionaires and they're not even born yet—it's that kind of legacy. It's like something built on a solid foundation that can be passed down, that can help, you know, further down the line to create safety and stability for your family.
So this might be what the goal is here for our main character, and right now we're in this situation where, do I need to learn something more? Do I need to go back to a school or a training to get more information on how to grow these crops or invest my money or, you know, whatever it is that your character is interested in. But there's a clear separation between where this person is and where they want to go. And the way that they're going to get there is by some kind of, you know, learning structure, some kind of institution where they can move up the ranks and learn things.
Five of Swords
Okay, and we have here the Five of Swords. So this is going to indicate that some people might be jealous; definitely some people are going to get left behind. You know, sometimes it can be like, this card can come across as like a sore winner, or somebody who is willing to risk everything to win.
But sometimes it can just be that like, you challenged these people, or these people challenged you and you won fair and square. And just because they are upset about it doesn't mean that you should not collect your prize, which is the rest of the swords. So there could be some kind of conflict in that once the main character achieves this stability through whatever, you know, course or institution they're going to go through that other people are going to feel left out or left behind, or like, oh, it's not fair.
But it is fair. Our main character has done the work and won fair and square and deserves, you know, the spoils of their victory. But it could set up a conflict later on where these characters come back to try to make trouble for our main character. Right? So maybe in this whole process, our main character has made an enemy.
What did you think of this tarot reading and the cards as visual prompts for story development? Share with us in the comments, and contact us if you’re interested in working one-on-one with Teneice in part 3 of Writing Toward Balance and Wholeness: Tarot and the Narrative Arc (taking parts 1 and 2 first is not required).
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