The Herald

Grief is not an event. It is a journey, and like every journey worth taking, it has a shape. Long before psychology gave that shape a name, long before writing had recorded it on tablets or paper, myth had already given it form, mapping it out in our human story. Whether it was couched in terms such as the call, the threshold, the descent, the ordeal or the return, the story of grief is as old as existence itself.

The narrative of what it means to be human has been told through traditions so ancient that we still cannot chart their true origins, whilst more recently, psychology has charted the same terrain in clinical language: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, without ever using the word myth. One might even consider that these are two maps of different countries, written in different languages, but I say they are one map drawn twice, in different inks.

Grief is universal in structure but never uniform in expression, and through the lens of astrology & tarot, I am seeking to develop a new framework in which the two might combine in a way that can help us to understand or at least explore grief, something we all encounter in so many different ways, every day of our lives.

This is the hinge on which The Tarot of Grief turns. Each court card supplies the structure of the descent, while its emotional register, stage by stage, discovers the buried inferior function that supplies the wound. The ordeal is not generic suffering but the precise place where this particular archetype’s denial, anger, and bargaining will cluster, because it is the place where this archetype is least equipped to look. The Princess of Wands does not grieve like the Queen of Cups; the Princess’s restless avoidance of stillness is not the Queen’s overprotection of memory. Each figure must eventually pass through the one door it has spent its whole life walking past, and what it carries back through that door, the elixir, is always some portion of the very function it once exiled.

The Importance of the 36 Decans

If we adopt the understanding of the decans (and hence the 36 pip cards of the tarot) as living thresholds or gateways of experience, grief can be understood not as a single emotional state but as a journey through a series of distinct portals. Each portal opens onto a different landscape of loss, memory, longing, transformation, and eventual renewal. Rather than moving through a fixed sequence of stages, the grieving person passes through a succession of symbolic chambers, each governed by its own images, challenges, and forms of wisdom. The experience of grief is therefore not linear but initiatory, requiring repeated crossings into unfamiliar territories of the soul.

In this model, each decan becomes a particular face of bereavement. One portal may confront us with shock and rupture, another with memory and yearning, another with anger, regret, or loneliness. Still others reveal acceptance, devotion, gratitude, or the rediscovery of meaning. The strange figures preserved in the ancient decan images may be understood as guardians of these thresholds, representing the psychological and spiritual realities encountered within each chamber. To enter a decan is to enter a specific mode of grieving, a particular relationship to absence and remembrance.

The decans are therefore not merely symbols of personality or fate, but maps of human transformation. Grief itself becomes a pilgrimage through the thirty-six faces, each offering a different lesson concerning attachment, separation, mortality, and continuity. Some faces teach endurance, others surrender; some require confrontation, others contemplation. Together they describe the many forms through which loss reshapes the human heart.

Seen in this way, the purpose of grief is not simply recovery but initiation. Each portal alters the traveller who passes through it. The person who emerges is not the same as the one who entered. Just as the zodiac unfolds the complete cycle of life, the decans reveal the many hidden chambers through which sorrow may become wisdom, memory may become blessing, and how absence may gradually be transformed into meaning.

The aim is not to flatten grief into a chart, but the opposite: to show that the chart was always there, hiding inside the myth, inside the type, inside the card, and that naming it makes the descent no easier, but hopefully a little less lonely.

The Last Decan of Gemini -The Herald’s Emergence

The last decan of Gemini is ruled by the Sun.

There comes a moment in the long interior passage of sorrow when something stirs that has not stirred in what feels like an age of the world; when the voice, so long folded inward upon itself, so long turned away from the open air and the company of others and the bright demanding surface of things, begins, tentatively, almost without permission, as though it has forgotten the protocols of speech, to move again toward expression. This is the territory of the last decan of Gemini, where the Sun enters the mercurial realm of exchange and visibility and lifts what has been hidden into the light, not gently, not cautiously, but with the full solar authority of one who knows that what has been learned in darkness was learned precisely so that it might, in time, be carried into the open.

The figure who presides here is both beautiful and armed; she wears the face of Isis, the face of one who has already descended, has already gathered the scattered pieces of what she loved, already passed through the underworld, and she carries a bow, which is not a weapon of close combat but of distance and aim and the willingness to release; to let the arrow leave the hand and travel through the air toward a target that is not yet certain but is, nonetheless, chosen. This choosing is the daring act that this decan demands of the griever, arriving at this threshold having survived the Saturnine reckoning, the long dark arithmetic of consequence and loss.

The hero who has endured the ordeal does not remain in the cave; the cave was never the destination, only the crucible, and what was smelted there in the heat of sorrow, the strange new knowledge of one’s own dimensions, the understanding of what endures and what does not, the altered relationship to time and to the future and to the particular quality of light that falls on a world that has been irrevocably changed, must now be carried outward. This process is itself a form of courage, perhaps the most demanding form, because it requires the self that was so carefully folded into its grief to unfold again before others, to speak in a voice that is recognisably one’s own and yet changed, to say: I was here; I went somewhere; I have returned with something to tell you.

Mercury’s gift to this decan is the medium: the word, the gesture, the signal sent across the distance between one interior world and another; and the Sun’s gift is the willingness to be seen in the act of sending it — for there is a particular vulnerability in public expression after private devastation, a fear that the voice will crack or the words will be inadequate or the world will fail to receive what has cost so much to bring to speech; and yet the arrow, once it has been drawn and aimed, demands release, and the herald who has lingered too long in preparation knows at some level that the proclomation she carries is already overdue, that somewhere in the world there are people who wish to hear what she alone, having made the journey, has to say.

This is the decan of honest emergence; of the daring that is not bravado but the quiet, solar insistence on being present again; of the voice finding its register in the open air after the long silence of necessary grief; and if the message is not yet perfectly formed, if it is at first, difficult to understand, or varies slightly in it’s meaning, that too is part of the beauty, for what is being communicated here is not only the content of the words but the fact of their speaking, the visible act of a self that has passed through its ordeal and chosen, deliberately and with full knowledge of what it has cost, to continue.

The astrological structure

Mercury and the Sun, in combination, produce a face about communication made visible. Mercury alone is quick, neutral, darting, the pure messenger without ego investment in the message. The Sun adds authority, warmth, and crucially, the willingness to be seen. So where Mercury might carry a message anonymously, the Sun insists on a named sender. It is not just about speaking, it’s about daring to be publicly present again after the long inwardness of mourning.

The air/mutable quality matters here too. Air is the element of exchange, connection, and transmission between minds. Mutable Gemini is in transition, between seasons, capable of holding multiple things simultaneously, which maps well onto the grief experience of being neither fully in sorrow nor fully returned to ordinary life. The Sun illuminating that mutable air quality creates something like a figure stepping out of a doorway into daylight, blinking, adjusting, but moving forward.

This is a project in the making. We will be working on it over the next number of months, possibly years, and it will take as long as it takes. Having been incubating for three years already, it seems it is now time to announce that this project is on its way. Give us a follow on Kickstarter to be notified at the start of the campaign…… and who knows how far this arrow will fly!