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. January's prompt will be about beginning a story about a hero's journey as it correlates to The Fool.
Using tarot's The Fool to begin a Hero's Journey story
Watch and listen to Teneice's tarot reading for writers, or read the transcript of the reading below.
Hi everyone, welcome to On Deck, and happy 2025. This year, we're going to try something new, which is doing these video blogs or vlogs so that you can see the cards and I can kind of do more interactive prompts with you guys. So what we're going to do is take a look at the hero's journey and correlate it to the cards in the major arcana of the tarot deck.
The Fool
So, first thing’s first, we're going to take a look at the fool and see how the fool in the tarot deck could kind of correlate to our hero, and the first two phases of the hero's journey, which is the ordinary world and the call to adventure. So the ordinary world is where we meet our hero, the journey has not started yet, we're kind of seeing the normal world that the hero lives in, kind of what they do, their reality that has to fundamentally change. So we set that up and then we have the call to adventure, which is, there's a situation that happens, usually we kind of talk about it as like the inciting incident—something happens and the hero has to make a decision—but either way, the world is not going to stay the same, like the world that the hero lives in is going to change.
So the hero has to make the decision to go on this journey that is prompted by this inciting incident, or you know stay home and let the world happen to him, which wouldn't make a good story. So usually the hero, the main character, has to make that decision. They either decide to go forth on their own volition, they're sent abroad on a quest, they stumble upon this adventure as a result of a blunder, or they kind of are somehow more aware of the environment than everybody else and they see something that changes their…fundamentally changes their worldview.
Okay, so let's take a look at this full card. I use the Morgan Greer when I do readings, it's just the deck that I like the best, but the standard deck is the Rider-Waite-Smith and that's usually what the graphics are that we show, but I'm going to, I'm going to use my deck here. This is the one that I like to use and it's basically the same, it's just a little bit more stylized, the colors are a little different, okay.
So if we take a look at the full card, we can see right off the bat that we have this young person, you know, obviously youthful, getting ready to go out on this journey. They do have some kind of skill, right, that they're good at because we see the laurel wreath on their head and the feather in their hair and that means that they are, they have been recognized for being good at something. Whether or not that skill is particularly useful in the world that they live in now is up for debate, you know, that's up to you, but there is something that this main character is good at either because they've worked really hard at it or it's just a natural gift, and in some way, there is some kind of recognition of that and we know kind of as a foreshadowing that this thing that they're really good at will eventually come in handy on this journey.
We can see that this main character, this young person, is holding a white rose, and that symbolizes innocence and purity. This, you know, hero does not have much in the way of experience for this adventure that they're going to set off on. They may have experience in other things, but this adventure will be a new world that they're into that they don't have much experience with.
We can also see that by this kind of sack that they are taking with them, you know, that's kind of all the knowledge, it represents all the knowledge that they have, so it's not very much, right? They're not very experienced, they don't have much information, like learned information on this particular path that they're setting out on, and that's a good thing because it keeps them from making assumptions and limiting themselves, but obviously it's a bad thing because they're gonna have to learn the hard way, right? They're gonna have to learn by experience.
We also have this white dog here that symbolizes kind of the excitement for adventure and whether or not your main character is ready to go on this journey or wants to go on this journey, there's something kind of in them that's excited about it, that's ready for this journey. This could be an actual animal companion or a friend who's excited about it and is encouraging them on, or this could be kind of like something inside themselves that they're secretly longing to, you know, be a hero, go on this journey, solve this problem, whatever has come up, okay? So we are going to pull a couple cards and we are going to see kind of what skill or talent our hero is good at that maybe hasn't been fully utilized yet, and we're going to see what the inciting incident is that puts them in this position of having to make a decision. So we can see in this card that they actually haven't started on the journey. They're getting ready to take that first step into the uncharted space, but they haven't gotten there yet. This is like the moment right before they step out onto that journey, okay? So let's see, we're going to take a couple cards, we're going to see what skill or talent, what hidden ability, does our main character have that will be utilized on this journey, and what is the inciting incident.
Inciting incident: The Four of Swords and the Five of Pentacles
Okay. All right, so we have the four of swords and the five of pentacles. So this four of swords is a really interesting card because this is a card of—let's see if we can get that to focus here—this is a card of resting, meditating, relaxing, recovery. It tells us that—I'm trying to get that to focus for you—it tells us that there's a skill in meditation, and learning, and being quiet, and listening, not rushing to decisions, but kind of really sitting in your thoughts. That’s the four of swords there, those are thoughts, ideas, logic, right? So really being able to sit with the ideas, maybe a little too much, they're kind of, you know, maybe they're in their world, they're overly thoughtful, they have too much contemplation happening, but really what's going to happen in this journey is that this gift for—there we go—this gift for not pushing themselves, not arguing with themselves, not debating internally over and over, is going to be something that is very useful to them on their journey.
And then the five of pentacles here shows that the inciting incident is probably some kind of poverty, or somebody gets really sick. This is the card of…this is supposed to be like a leper, right? And his caregiver, and they're out on the streets, you know, they've lost everything, and if they would just turn around, they could see that there would be help for them. Maybe they could take sanctuary inside the church or something like that, but it looks like the inciting incident is some kind of deterioration in health, or loss of wealth and money, or somebody got hurt. So there's a need to go on this journey to maybe retrieve some kind of medicine, or earn some money to find a doctor, you know, whatever it is in that context, okay? So just to line these up here, we have the four of swords and the five of pentacles, and this is our hidden talent here, and the reason why our main character here has to go off on this journey, like that’s their inciting incident.
So I hope that was helpful and a good start to our year, and like I said, we're going to go through the Hero's Journey and the Major Arcana, and we're going to use these to kind of build a story. I'll give you writing prompts every month, and hopefully we can make some meaningful correlations between the Fool and the Major Arcana and our Hero's Journey, all right?
Thank you so much for joining me on this vlog, and I'll see you again next month.
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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