The Nemesis Reading

The High Priestess & The Devil in conflict

Sometimes you know absolutely nothing about your story except that two characters hate each other. Conflict drives narratives, so just having a pair of bitter enemies is a perfect place to start.

For this tarot reading, you can work with characters you already have planned, or generate some possible pairings with a Random Draw. Below I outline how to do the Nemesis Reading with my Reverse Draw method.

The Linestrider Tarot booklet & deck

Note: In this post, I will be using the Linestrider Tarot created by Siolo Thompson. I encountered this deck while dog-sitting for my mother’s friend, who to my surprise had arranged her entire collection of oracle cards across her dining room table for me to explore.

She owns an eclectic array of decks, from the Thoth Tarot to the Wild Unknown, as well as the Rumi Oracle and Story Cards. You can find my post recounting my experience with all these decks and more here.

Reverse Draw

I’m a big proponent of using the tarot outside of their traditional context, like reversing the process and choosing the cards you want for a reading, or giving the cards an answer to seek a question.

With a Reverse Draw, you intentionally pull certain cards you already associate with someone or something to do a deep analysis of what they mean for you--not necessarily what they mean according to tradition or the booklet they came with.

So for a Nemesis reading, I pulled the card I associate with my protagonist, and the one that represents my antagonist. Simply having them in front of me, next to each other, helps me visualize the conflict between them. Having a symbolic representation also provides opportunities for free association exercises, character visualization, and motif creation.

My Nemesis Cards

To begin my Nemesis Reading, I reverse draw The High Priestess to represent my protagonist, Persephone, because the card traditionally depicts the Ancient Greek goddess of nature perched on a throne. Naive and helpless in the beginning, Persephone acquires self-knowledge and -determination, which align with the upright meanings of the High Priestess card. She represents wisdom, intuition, and nature’s cycles of growth.

For the opposite card, you would think my antagonist--none other than Aides, King of the Underworld--would be Death, but this card implies rebirth and endings that become beginnings, and Aides in my story is incapable of change. I chose the Devil to represent him because he’s continually repeating the same patterns of addiction, depression, and hedonism. Though others have put him in his situation, he remains imprisoned due to his own vices.

Aside from his role as villain, kidnapper, and rapist, Aides is Persephone's nemesis in a figural sense because he is her opposite, the barrier on her path to growth and healing. Consumed by rage against his brother, Zeus, for trapping him in his role as hated death-bringer, alone in an eternal limbo, Aides becomes by proxy the god of stagnation, turning the underworld into a place of decay rather than a resting place between death and the next life.

Next to each other, these two represent conflicting forces: growth vs. decay, change vs. stagnancy, nature vs. interference, just as much as they represent behaviors in conflict, like healing vs. self-destruction, or their overt actions that drive the plot, like kidnapping vs. escape or violence vs. self-defense.

But nemeses often have more in common than you would think. Both Persephone and Aides are trapped--they simply react to their imprisonment in different ways. And both resent Zeus for their current dilemmas.

Having a shared enemy creates an interesting dynamic between two characters who hate each other, because it forces them, or at least their readers, to see the similarities between them, and can even lead to the two working together. A shared enemy could never mend the trauma Aides inflicts on Persephone, but it does disrupt the power exchange between them and creates a tense bargaining opportunity that leads to even more conflict.