*If I can beg of you to stick with me through some dry bits at the beginning, I have a fun little breakdown about two-thirds of the way down this post.

Ah, the beautiful and handsome energy of the Hierophant calls to me with lessons aplenty… Since he is the teacher, I have a few questions for today’s Tarot card from Lyn Thurman’s “Writing the Wisdom of Your Soul” October 2014 writing challenge. The questions he poses to me are, “How will YOU teach your legacy? What knowledge can you pass along? What of your experience can you share?”

It’s pretty incredible to me (and stick with me here – this is all metaphorical and I’m aware that it’s all about using symbolic language to describe emotive states, which not everyone is comfortable doing) that the Emperor is the next card in the Tarot to follow the Empress, about whom I wrote yesterday. I’ve never studied the order of the Tarot, just generally understand that it’s similar to a regular deck of cards with the face cards (Major Arcana) and the suit cards (Minor Arcana), so each day of this writing challenge is a surprise to me. Why is it so incredible though? Because I was writing yesterday about boundaries being a struggle for me and what does the Emperor bring? Yep, boundaries. And more: Structure.

Of the many things in this big, wide world that fascinate me, the tools people use in the practice of their spiritual beliefs are some of the most intriguing. They are sometimes looked on as representative of divinity, sometimes as actual body and blood of their figurehead. Sometimes they are understood as symbol, as metaphor for something believed to be real but yet unseen.