Grief is one of the few experiences we must all eventually face, yet it remains among the least understood. Traditional Tarot offers profound symbolic wisdom, while modern grief studies provide valuable psychological insight, although rarely are these two worlds brought together in a way that honours both the ancient tradition and the lived reality of loss.
The Tarot of Grief was born from the conviction that grief is not simply an emotion to be endured, but a transformative journey, long recognised within the great symbolic traditions of the West. Drawing upon some of the oldest surviving astrological and Hermetic sources, including the decanic image traditions of the Liber Hermetis, the writings of Ibn Ezra, Hellenistic astrology, and the wider medieval and Renaissance tradition, this work seeks to recover the original symbolic language from which much of the Tarot ultimately emerged.
Rather than treating the Tarot as a system of prediction alone, the book approaches each card as an archetypal stage in the soul’s response to loss, change, and renewal. Every decan is first examined through its traditional astrological foundations and ancient image witnesses, before being interpreted through the universal processes of grief and personal transformation. In this way, the ancient symbolic tradition is not replaced by modern psychology but allowed to illuminate it, revealing how they both describe different aspects of the same enduring human experience.
Throughout the work, grief is understood not as a disorder to be overcome, but as an initiatory process which serves to reshape our identity, our relationships, our purpose and spiritual understanding. The familiar imagery of the Tarot becomes a map of this inner landscape, helping the reader recognise where they stand, what their present experience may be teaching, and how each stage prepares the way for the next. Loss is therefore presented not as the end of the journey, but as the beginning of a profound education of the soul.
The LWB volume, which accompanies the Tarot deck, adopts a more intimate voice. Rather than analysing the symbolism, it speaks directly to the reader, offering each card as a quiet companion through the process of bereavement. Together, the two books serve different but complementary purposes: one explores the historical and symbolic foundations of the cards, while the other offers practical reflection and gentle encouragement during the lived experience of grief.
Although rooted in traditional astrology and the Western esoteric tradition, The Tarot of Grief is intended for a far wider audience. It will appeal to Tarot readers seeking a deeper symbolic foundation for the Minor Arcana, astrologers interested in recovering the ancient decanic traditions, students of Hermetic philosophy and myth, counsellors and therapists exploring symbolic approaches to bereavement, and, above all, anyone searching for meaning after profound loss. No prior knowledge of astrology or Tarot is required to benefit from its central message.
At its heart, The Tarot of Grief proposes a simple but enduring truth: grief is not a path we walk to forget those we have loved. It is the path by which love itself is transformed. The ancient symbols preserved across centuries remind us that every ending contains the possibility of renewal, every trial carries the seed of wisdom, and every stage of sorrow invites the soul into a deeper understanding of what it truly means to live, to remember, and ultimately, to love.
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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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
