Teneice Durrant, creator of Tarot with Ten, will use various tarot and oracle decks to provide monthly readings for writers with exercises on using imagery and intuition as prompts. March's prompt will be about exploring the High Priestess and the inner voice to help with story development.
Using tarot’s High Priestess to develop story elements
Watch and listen to Teneice's tarot reading for writers, or read the transcript of the reading below.
The High Priestess
Hi everyone, welcome to this month's On Deck. We are continuing on with our series of using the tarot cards to work through the hero's journey and the kind of 15-beat structure of, you know, a narrative structure of a story.
So today we're talking about card number two, which is the High Priestess, about intuition and knowing coming from outside yourself and premonitions and all those things. It talks about kind of being in touch with your inner voice, listening to your gut instinct, things like that. So we can see that there's a woman here who is dressed in these kind of religious garments. She has a scroll in her lap and she's sitting between these two pillars. Her feet are on the moon, and that moon is replicated here on her forehead. So she is a very spiritual, very meta-type individual who can see kind of the beginning, the middle, and end all at the same time.
She does have the Torah here in her lap, which indicates that, to her, spiritual practice is not something that you learn and then put on the shelf. It is a continuous learning process and the learning is an evolution that changes as we grow older. So this is a really good card to help us learn more about the character and what kind of things they need to learn internally, right? Instead of like skills they need to learn, what do they need to learn about themselves as they go through this process?
So we're going to pull a few cards and see what our main character here needs to know about their internal process and what they need to learn about themselves. I personally do not read the High Priestess as trusting your intuition because unless you are fully healed and have gone through therapy and all that awesome stuff, trauma damages our intuition, okay? So unless you have gone through the process of healing your trauma, your gut might lie to you to kind of keep you alive. That's what your gut thinks: that its main job is to keep you alive and things, you know, threatening situations are there to hurt you. It's also that saying “Don't believe everything your brain tells you,” right? We have some subconscious instincts that are, you know, like I said, just trying to keep us alive. So for me, the High Priestess is always about getting to a place where you're learning more about your spiritual practice and healing through whatever your spiritual practice entails, okay—so, prayer or meditation or acts of service or, you know, whatever it is.
So let's see what our main character needs to learn about themselves as this story progresses so that they can become the hero that we need them to be. Let's see if we can't get one or two more cards. This one? Okay.
Nine of Pentacles
The first card that came out for us is the Nine of Pentacles, and it's in reverse, and I don't normally read reversals when I'm doing personal readings, but I do like them in our storytelling because we know this is a thing that our main character needs to resolve in themselves by the end of the story to complete their character arc. So the Nine of Pentacles is feelings of internal worth, feelings of being self-sufficient, being good enough, being confident in their abilities to handle anything that comes at them. This Nine of Pentacles here represents somebody who is not necessarily single but is independent in that they can take care of themselves. Like they have the resources, they have the knowledge, and that's represented by the grapes because in the tarot, grapes are something that's very hard to grow, and if you can grow them well, that means you have a lot of skill and knowledge.
So this person, our main character, so far does not have the internal feelings of I know enough, I am worth this journey, I am worth being taken seriously, I am worth the position that I want to hold. So we know that as this story continues, as we're writing this story, we're going to need to find opportunities for our main character to use their internal, you know, whatever spiritual practice they have or whatever kind of rituals they have—if you have a specific religion or magic system or whatever it is in your story, how do they use that to learn about their self-worth? How does your main character use their internal intuition and spiritual practice to find self-worth? How do we turn this upright by the end of the story?
Eight of Cups
And we also have this card of the Eight of Cups which is maybe how they find this self-worth in that the Eight of Cups means walking away from things that no longer serve you. So you may have eight full cups, but you know that you're missing that ninth and tenth cup to make you feel fulfilled. There's a point where you have to follow your passions, and that's indicated by the red cloak. So our main character here needs to follow their passions, not do what people think is the best thing for them to do, but do the thing that makes them, you know, full of life and energy. The main character is going to need to turn away from these cups that other people have filled for him and go fill up his own cup. And that's what's going to help him feel the self-worth, right? Feel confident in their knowledge, in their worth. And the way that they get to this point is by really looking inside and learning more about their practice and really looking internally, to internal skills and thoughts and thought process.
The other thing that I think is really interesting is that both of these cards here have a sliver of a moon. This one is an eclipse, and we do have two eclipses in March, so check those out if you are interested in that kind of thing. But this could be something that you use in your story: that an eclipse happens and it reveals something to the main character about their internal process that helps them recognize that they need to move on.
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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