What if power in writing was not a single moment of brilliance, but a long chain of decisions unfolding across years?

What if influence did not depend on spectacle or volume, but on the patient shaping of alliances, timing, and narrative position?

And what if the most decisive moves in your work were not the dramatic ones, but the little choices that gradually rearranged the field around you?

This is the spirit of Card XXXVII: Eleanor of Aquitaine, The Power Broker.

Eleanor understood power not as a possession, but as a current that moved through relationships, geography, loyalty, and story. She moved across kingdoms, marriages, courts, and crusades as one of its most skilled navigators. Where others relied on status or inheritance, Eleanor worked with something more subtle: timing, influence, and the slow accumulation of strategic position.

This card invites you to think of writing not as a single persuasive act, but as a long political game. It asks you to recognise that ideas, reputations, and authority are rarely established through one dramatic moment; rather, they are built through sustained positioning and through the alliances you form with readers, the stories you tell about your work, and the patience with which you allow influence to grow.

To write with Eleanor is to understand that craft includes foresight. Every page participates in a longer trajectory, and every narrative decision shapes what becomes possible next.

Your story, prompts and card downloads are below. May you go forth and add strategy to your writing.

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What if the real danger was speaking the truth to people who had already decided not to hear it?

What if the sharpest insight in your work is the one you’ve been training yourself not to say out loud?

This is the spirit of Card XXXVI: Cassandra, The Ignored.

Cassandra didn’t lack accuracy. What she lacked was reception.

Gifted with prophecy and cursed to never be believed, she embodies the brutal tension between seeing clearly and being heard at all. Her story reminds us that truth alone does not guarantee persuasion and that power often resists what arrives too early, too clearly, or too inconveniently.

This card invites you to write what you know even when it will not be welcomed.

It asks you to release the exhausting labour of pre-emptive softening and then to let the sentence stand without begging for agreement.

Let’s explore how below, prompts and all!

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What if the language of danger is never neutral, but instead tends to crystallise most sharply in moments when a culture is already strained, divided, and afraid of its own instability?

What if the most powerful thing language does is not describe danger, but decide where we look for it?

And what if fear, once given the weight of official vocabulary, begi…

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What if the most valuable thing you can write this week is not certainty, but threshold-truth. What if it’s the sentence that arrives before it has evidence, before it has language, and before it has social permission?

What if your next piece of power isn’t a conclusion at all, but an apprenticeship to the half-formed: the strange, bright knowing that shows up early and refuses to behave like a tidy argument?

This is the spirit of Card XXXIV: Merlin, The Wizard.

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What if the most powerful act of writing this week is not persuasion, or polish, or performance, but restoration: the deliberate return of complexity to a story that was flattened for convenience?

What if, instead of refining the version of yourself that travels well in public, you wrote from the private chamber of thought—that place where motives are mixed, emotions are layered, and no sentence needs to behave for the crowd?

This is the spirit of Card XXXIII: Marie Antoinette, The Scapegoat.

Marie Antoinette became a symbol before she was understood, and once she had been converted into symbol, spectacle, and shorthand, very few people felt any obligation to recover the person who still existed behind the projection.

Young and foreign in a court built on ritual and surveillance, she was gradually turned into a container for outrage, anxiety, and moral theatre. History, and especially popular history, punished her less for what she demonstrably did than for what others needed her to represent.

This card invites you to write from the place where you, too, have been misread and reduced. It invites you to restore the interior truth that never made it into the loud version of the story.

Card XXXIII: Marie Antoinette

The one who became a myth

In The Rhetorica, Marie Antoinette stands for narrative substitution: the moment when a living, thinking human being is replaced in the public imagination by a simplified figure that can carry blame more efficiently than truth ever could.

The scapegoat is not selected because the story is accurate, but because the story is useful. Complexity slows accusation down, whereas symbols accelerate it, and public narratives often prefer speed over precision.

To work with this card is to resist narrative reduction in your own pages. It is to notice where a person—including yourself—has been turned into a headline, a trope, a cautionary tale, or a convenient villain…and to reintroduce interiority where the record has grown thin.

This week, you are not writing the visible version of events. You are writing the interior version and the one that unfolded in thought, hesitation, contradiction, and private reasoning while the outer story rushed past.

The story of Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette (1755–1793) entered France as a teenage Austrian archduchess, married into a monarchy already strained by debt, factionalism, and deep political unease. From the moment she arrived at court, she was observed as an object of interpretation. Her gestures were decoded, her tastes criticised, her foreignness emphasised long before she held meaningful political influence.

As unrest in France intensified, so too did the appetite for figures who could embody public anger. Pamphleteers, satirists, and propagandists found in the young woman a ready-made character. Exaggerations hardened into accepted facts, invented quotes travelled as truth, and symbolic excess attached itself to her image whether or not it matched her daily reality.

She became a narrative device as much as a queen.

And yet her private correspondence and surviving records reveal a far more intricate inner life: maternal devotion, loneliness, fear, miscalculation, loyalty, and a growing awareness of how precarious her position had become. There is a marked difference between the woman in the letters and the woman in the caricatures.

For writers, her legacy is not a moral but a method: when the outer narrative grows loud and simplified, the inner narrative becomes more necessary. The unwritten interior is often where the truth survives.

Symbols + Secrets

Red velvet
The language of luxury turned into evidence; how texture, beauty, and softness are recast as moral failure when a crowd needs proof of excess

White rose
Innocence debated and denied; reputation placed on trial; the fragile distance between purity as lived and purity as judged

The corn flower
Private loyalty and remembrance; the quiet, personal symbol that survives long after public narratives collapse

The façade of Versailles
Magnificence as mask; curated splendour that conceals strain, fear, and political fracture behind symmetry and gold

The mirrored halls
Distorted reflection and multiplied story; the way perception refracts when too many voices narrate the same figure at once

Creative Prompt: Write the interior

Prompt:
How have you become a story that isn’t you?

This week, choose one:

1. Write the moment when the narrative about you grew louder than your own voice. What were you actually thinking at the time?

2. Write a scene in which you were publicly misunderstood, and stay entirely inside your private reasoning rather than the outer reaction.

3. Write from the instant you realised you were being reduced to a type, a role, or a symbol…and record your true interior response.

4. Write the “private room behind the spectacle”: the thoughts, doubts, motives, and emotions that never made it into the visible version.

Now: restore complexity.

Let the sentences return nuance where the outer story preferred simplicity.

How to use this in your business copy

This week: write something with dimension

Instead of refining your public-facing story into something smoother, consider making it more dimensional, because credibility is built less from perfection than from articulated interior logic.

When you allow your audience to see the reasoning behind a decision, the tension behind a pivot, or the layered motives behind your work, you replace suspicion with understanding and distance with trust. You are no longer presenting a façade; you are offering a mind at work.

Try:

• “This is the part of the story most people never heard.” (newsletter opening)

• “Here’s what was actually happening behind the decision.” (about page line)

• “The public version is simple. The real version is human.” (sales page positioning)

• “I was reduced once. Now I write the full truth.” (Instagram caption)

Clarity of interior motive is persuasive in a way polish alone can never be.

Next week we’ll do magic.

But for now…

Write like Marie Antoinette:
complex, interior, and irreducible..

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P.S.

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What if guidance was harsh preparation?

What if the teacher you needed was not the one who soothed you, but the one who refused to let you remain untested?

What if the true measure of learning was not reassurance, but the point at which return was no longer possible?

This is the spirit of Card XXXII: Scáthach, The Hero’s Guide.

Scáthach prepares rather than reassures.

Living at the edge of the known world, she trains warriors through ordeal, discipline, and risk, believing that skill is forged only under pressure and that mastery cannot be inherited or explained gently.

To approach her is to accept transformation without guarantees and to step into training that will change your body, your instincts, and your sense of self.

This card invites you to write from the moment learning becomes irreversible.

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What if knowledge was not inherited, but discovered under pressure?

What if truth did not descend from authority, but emerged through contact, reaction, and risk?

What if understanding required not obedience, but the courage to test what everyone else repeated?

This is the spirit of Card XXXI: Paracelsus, The Chemist.

Paracelsus rejected inherited authority in favor of experiment. He believed that matter itself could teach, that substances carried intelligences waiting to be observed, and that healing depended on reaction, balance, and transformation rather than doctrine.

By treating the body as a chemical system rather than a moral problem, he helped lay the foundations of modern chemistry. His work insisted that truth must be tested, not revered.

This card invites you to write through experiment rather than tradition.

It asks you to put ideas into contact with reality and to trust what reveals itself under real conditions, even when the result contradicts what you were taught to believe.

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What if conviction was heavier than love?

What if the most dangerous decisions were made not from hatred, but from devotion to an idea?

What if the act meant to save the future was the very thing that made it impossible to return?

This is the spirit of Card XXX: Marcus Junius Brutus, The Burdened.

Brutus loved Rome more than he loved Caesar, and that devotion destroyed them both.

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What if power revealed itself not through control, but through the willingness to bear consequence?

What if the most destabilising figure in a kingdom was the one who refused to simplify the truth?

What if the most dangerous figure in a kingdom was not the one who broke the rules, but the one who revealed that the rules were already breaking?

This is the spirit of Card XXI: Guinevere, The Sovereign.

Guinevere is not the betrayal history tends to promote. She is the center where loyalty, desire, and power converge, and she’s the human point at which ideals meet their limits.

Her presence does not destroy Camelot so much as it illuminate it, exposing fault lines that already ran beneath vows and banners.

Through her, the kingdom is forced to confront what it has tried to deny: that purity is a fantasy, and that love, allegiance, and truth rarely align without cost.

This card invites you to write from moral complexity rather than innocence.

It asks you to resist the comfort of clean narratives and instead tell the truth that unsettles, the truth that costs something, the truth that cannot be smoothed into a parable without being diminished.

Write not to preserve harmony, but to honor reality.

Card XXIX: Guinevere

The one who reveals the fault lines

In The Rhetorica, Guinevere is the patron of contested authority.

She governs the space where choice becomes visible, and where the heart and the crown pull in different directions. It’s that space where the consequences of love cannot be delegated to myth.

Writing with Guinevere means refusing to outsource responsibility to fate or villainy. It means standing inside the decision and allowing its weight to be felt.

This is not writing that seeks absolution.

It is writing that accepts consequence as the price of truth.

The story of Guinevere

Guinevere’s story survives largely through accusation. She is remembered as an adulteress, a catalyst, and an excuse.

Yet these labels flatten a far more difficult reality: she is a woman navigating sovereignty in a world that demands her symbolic purity while denying her full humanity.

Her marriage is political, her love is personal, and the collision between the two exposes the fragility of the idealised order around her.

Camelot does not fall because Guinevere loves.

Oh no…it falls because the Kingdom cannot reconcile its ideals with the truth of human desire and divided loyalty.

Guinevere becomes the screen onto which that failure is projected; her body and choices are turned into moral shorthand so the system itself does not have to be questioned.

For writers, her lesson is profound.

There are moments when telling the truth means accepting that you will be misread. That complexity will be punished. That refusing of simplification may cost you approval, belonging, or safety.

Guinevere teaches us that sovereignty is not the absence of conflict, but the courage to remain present within it.

To write with Guinevere is to hold the veil and lift it at the same time.

Symbols + Secrets

White roses
love entwined with obligation; beauty that carries consequence; innocence redefined rather than erased

Holy cross
vows, sacrifice, and the weight of moral law; faith as structure rather than refuge

Veil
what is hidden to survive; what is revealed to remain truthful; the threshold between private knowing and public judgment

Spring
renewal born from rupture; the season after collapse; life that insists on returning despite loss

Creative Prompt: Write the divided choice

Prompt:
What choice in your life could not be made cleanly?

This week, choose one:

1. Write about a moment when loyalty pulled you in more than one direction, and no option allowed you to remain innocent.

2. Write the internal argument you never voiced, letting each side speak fully without resolution.

3. Write from the moment after the decision, when consequence had already begun to unfold.

4. Write the truth you withheld in order to keep the peace, and examine what that silence cost you.

Now: let the page hold the tension.

Do not rush toward forgiveness of clarity.

Allow the complexity to remain intact.

How to use this in your business copy

This week: write from sovereignty rather than safety.

Guinevere reminds us that audiences do not trust perfection; they trust discernment. They recognize writing that has wrestled with consequence and chosen honesty anyway.

Try:

• “This was not an easy choice, but it was the honest one.” (newsletter opening)

• “Here’s where loyalty conflicted with truth…and why I chose truth.” (about page line)

• “This work exists because I refused the simpler story.” (sales page positioning)

• “I won’t pretend this decision was painless.” (Instagram caption)

When you allow your writing to acknowledge divided loyalties, it gains authority rather than losing it. Complexity signals maturity. Discernment builds trust.

Let your copy wear the crown without pretending it is light.
Let it hold love and consequence in the same hand.

Next week we’ll investigate betrayal and grief.

But for now…

Write like Guinevere:
sovereign, discerning, and brave enough to remain complex.

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What if your writing began not with certainty, but with departure?

What if creativity asked you to move first and understand later?

What if courage was simply the decision to follow curiosity beyond the edge of the known?

This is the spirit of Card XXVIII: Galileo Galilei, The Explorer.

Galileo crossed seas before he crossed the heavens. He learned to read wind, water, and horizon long before he learned to read the sky. Navigation trained his mind to trust movement, observation, and correction rather than inherited authority.

And he understood that knowledge does not arrive fully formed; it reveals itself only to those willing to leave the familiar and pay attention to what unfolds.

He reminds us that exploration is not recklessness. It is disciplined curiosity paired with courage.

It is the willingness to say, I will look for myself.

This card invites you to write from that same instinct.

It invites you to treat the page as a vessel rather than a verdict and to move first, observe carefully, and allow discovery to reshape what you thought you knew.

This week, write as an explorer.

Let curiosity lead.

Let courage steady your hand.

Let creativity be the logbook of what you actually encounter, not what you were told should be there.

Card XXVIII: Galileo

The one who explores

In The Rhetorica, Galileo is the patron of creative courage. He governs the moment when you stop repeating the map and begin testing the terrain.

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(TW: this issue discusses rape. If that’s not something for you to read about right now, then it’s best to skip this issue, and we’ll see you next week.)

What if your writing did not seek permission to be believed?

What if you stopped allowing your story to be edited to make others more comfortable?

What if the gaze you’ve been taught to soften is the very thing that carries your power?

This is the spirit of Card XXII: Medusa, The Petrifier.

Medusa was never the monster. She was a woman altered by violence and then transformed again by story.

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What if clarity wasn’t a soft light…

…but a blade?

What if understanding arrived not as a gentle revelation, but as something more deliberate: an incision, a careful parting of what you think you know so that you can finally see what lies beneath?

This is the spirit of Card XXVI: Galen.

Galen spent his life peering under the skin, opening bodies to understand the mysteries of illness, spirit, temperament, and the human condition itself.

His world was full of superstition, inherited thinking, and half-remembered theories, and yet he trusted his own hands.

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What if your writing didn’t start with a strict outline…

…but with a collection of various stories and tall tales?

What if the beginning wasn’t a thesis or a plan, but a small detail you once overheard, or a memory someone shared in passing, or a thread of myth that drifted towards you without explanation?

This is the spirit of Card XXV: Homer.

Homer himself has been placed into the land of legend, but in his time, he was a man who traveled from shore to shore, listening to fishermen, sailors, merchants, grandmothers, priests, and wanderers.

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What if your writing carried its own frequency?

What if every sentence was a sigil—half spell, half cipher?

What if meaning shimmered not on the surface, but in the reflection beneath?

This is the spirit of Card XXIV: John Dee, The Magus

John Dee lived at the threshold.

He was court astrologer to Elizabeth I, navigator of tides and empires, scholar of numbers, and keeper of obsidian mirrors.

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What if your writing followed the seasons of your life?
What if your creative winters were simply intervals of restoration?
And what if every idea that went quiet was simply gathering strength below the surface?

This is the spirit of Card XXI: The Green Man, The Eternal Return.

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What if your writing understood its own power?

What if every line carried both intellect and allure that was decorative, yes….but also gave direction?

This is the spirit of Card VII: Cleopatra, the Strategist.

Cleopatra ruled through fluency.

Quite literally, actually, as she spoke nine languages. And she had several modes of influence. A full spectrum of human persuasion: scholarship, ceremony, diplomacy, and the luminous confidence of someone who refused to be spoken for.

She understood that how a story is shaped determines who is believed.

And that narrative, once arranged with intention, is a force capable of outliving empire.

This card is not an invitation to seduce, which we tend to associate with Cleopatra. (We have a long history of placing extreme sexuality onto powerful women!)

Rather, this is an invitation to direct.

It invites you to choose your imagery the way Cleopatra chose her regalia, which is to say: let symbol become strategy and beauty become argument.

In other words: write as if the rumor mill were your court, and you were already on the throne.

Card XXII: Cleopatra

The one who shapes perception

In The Rhetorica, Cleopatra is the patron of narrative command.

She teaches that writing is choreography: a deliberate sequence of tone, detail and silence.

Your audience is always reading the subtext. As such, Cleopatra urges you to own that power and to let your choices speak before your explanation does.

To write with Cleopatra is to treat every sentence as a signifier, every metaphor as a declaration, and every image as a quiet coronation.

This week, you’re not writing passively.

You are writing to reign over your own story.

The story of Cleopatra

Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator (69–30 BCE) was Queen of Ptolemaic Egypt—a Macedonian Greek, who embraced Egyptian heritage in a way her predecessors never cared to do.

She inherited a kingdom knotted with dynastic tension and Roman ambition, and she answered with scholarship sharpened into statecraft.

She studied rhetoric, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and philosophy. She understood that knowledge is best cultivated as a performance.

Her first meeting with Caesar, arranged as a theatrical unveiling inside a carpet, was strategy rather than seduction. It was an act of narrative control.

Her arrival to Antony on a gilded barge, sails perfumed and musicians playing, was diplomacy rendered as art.

These gestures were rhetoric in motion and bigger than frivolity. They were a way of asserting identity before anyone else could define it.

And beneath the spectacle was clarity.

Cleopatra understood that symbols—the crown of Isis, the lotus blossom, the sacred serpent—spoke across borders and centuries.

She wielded them with exacting intelligence, proving what many writers forget: image is argument.

For writers, her lesson is steady and incisive.

Decide how you want to be understood. Choose a symbol, crown it, and let the rest of your work form constellations around it.
Let your language be deliberate, your silences articulate, and your structure as purposeful as a royal procession.

Cleopatra teaches us: direct the narrative…or someone else will.

Symbols + Secrets

Hieroglyphs
The original language of power; writing as magic; the truth that symbols can speak louder than sentences

The asp
Consequence chosen, not inflicted; the courage to end with agency; transformation that answers only to itself

The lotus
Rebirth, renewal, the mind that surfaces clear after turmoil; beauty as resilience

The tiger
Ferocity in focus; the disciplined strike; the quiet certainty of someone who knows when to wait and when to pounce

The winged scarab beetle
Rebirth through intellect; the mind that lifts itself; the ancient belief that the sun rises because someone willed it to begin again

Creative Prompt: write symbols as strategy

Prompt:
What is your biggest power move?

This week, choose one:

1. A decision you would make if you trusted your intellect completely.

2. A sentence that redirects the narrative through precision, not apology.

3. A silence that asserts itself more clearly than any explanation.

4. A moment in which you reclaimed the story from someone who tried to define it for you.

Now: write a paragraph that blends symbols and strategy.

Let your imagery be chosen, your cadence intentional.

Write as if your words were carved like hieroglyphs: enduring, decisive, and unmistakably your own.

How to use this in your business copy

This week: shape the story before anyone else does.

When you write like Cleopatra, you stop reacting and instead take the director’s role.

Your message shifts from scattered to sovereign. Tone becomes stance; imagery becomes influence; your voice becomes the architect.

Try:

“Here is the version of the story that endures.” (website hero)

“I choose the narrative—and this is what it means.” (newsletter opener)

“My message doesn’t persuade by chance; it persuades by design.” (Instagram/LinkedIn)

“Let this be inscribed: the heart of my work is…” (sales page subhead)

“I offer clarity, not conjecture—and here’s what follows.” (launch email)

Authority here is not dominance but coherence.
It is the steady signal that reassures your audience where to stand.

Next week we shift from strategy to something wilder.

But for now…

Write like Cleopatra:

strategic, sovereign, and fluent in the language of power.

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What if the thing that holds you down is also what holds you together?

What if endurance is not a sentence but a symmetry, and if your shoulders match the sky?

What if bearing the weight is itself an act of creation?

This is the spirit of Card XXI: Atlas, The Endurer.

Atlas carried the heavens because someone had to. He didn’t ask for worship, or reward. Instead, he simply stood steady beneath the turning constellations, holding the world aloft so that it could go on being beautiful.

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What if your writing was the hand that reached back from the dark?

What if you turned ruin into a roadmap, and sorrow into structure?

What if descent itself was the craft?

This is the spirit of Card XX: Dante Alighieri, The Infernal Guide.

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What if your writing didn’t apologise for itself?

What if it stepped forward, met the light, and persuaded without hustling.

What if it was as simple as holding court?

This is the spirit of Card XIX: Louis XIV, the Sovereign Sun.

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What if your best writing arrived the way dreams do: sideways, symbolic, and strangely sure of itself?

What if the image came first and the explanation arrived later, if at all?

This is the spirit of Card XVIII: Morpheus, the dream walker.

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