Category: Tarot of Grief
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Virgo II: The Petitioner
Venus in fall in Virgo has lost access to her most reliable gift, the quality of being simply received, of attracting without having to argue, of moving toward what she loves with the confidence of one who has rarely been refused. What she finds in Mercury’s exacting realm, in the mutable atmosphere of Virgo’s middle…
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Virgo I: The Harvester
The First Decan of Virgo marks a profound transition in the zodiacal journey. Having passed through the fullness and generosity of Leo, consciousness now turns from an outward demonstration of vigour, towards stewardship. The question is no longer how life may be enjoyed, but how it may be tended so that its blessings endure.
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Leo III: The Feast Lord
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the king who went out into the wilderness in lion skins, who crossed the waters of death and asked the oldest question a grieving creature can ask- What survives? What endures? Where does the beloved go? Can the loss be undone?- returned to his city with that question unanswered in…
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Leo II: The Noble Archer
The unknown land this decan governs is not simply a geographical unknown but an existential one, beyond the boundary of what the traveller has previously understood about loss, about love, about the self that continues when what it most loved has gone. Jupiter’s enlarging influence within the Sun’s own kingdom does not promise that this…
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Leo I: The Victorious Beast
The traveller who arrives in this decan is in the dull heat of the trial, a territory where the question is no longer whether the worst can be endured but whether endurance itself can be sustained toward a destination with no visible end. What is being tested here is not courage in any dramatic sense…
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Cancer III- The Protector
This is the territory of Cancer III, where the Moon inhabits her own sign, in her own face and finds no moderating influence, no planetary guest to introduce a foreign quality, only herself, distilled into the purest expression of what she has always been, the guardian of life at its most vulnerable, the force that…
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Cancer II-The Remembrancer
There is a second movement in the deep waters of Cancer that follows the disoriented tenderness of its first decan the way story follows experience, not immediately, not while the encounter is still raw and present and without edges, but in the quieter hours after, when the heart, having registered what it loves, begins the…
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Cancer I-The Enchanter
The energy of attachment is still fully active; it has simply lost its destination. That’s a very particular feature of early grief, not sadness exactly, but a kind of directionless yearning, the heart still reaching by reflex toward where the loved thing used to be.
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Days Above The Year: The Heriu Renpet
What the structure offers is a guarantee of texture, the assurance that every quality encountered in grief has been named, presided over and honoured. At the heart of the structure sit the five days above the year, which are not a stage that comes at the end of the process but a vertical dimension that…
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The Herald
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…