- Author / Artist: Mariana Louis: https://persephonessister.com/
- Publisher: Weiser Books (Red Wheel/Weiser)
- Publication Date: March / April 2026
- RRP: UK £23.99 / US $26.95
- ISBN: 978-1578638987
- Reviewed by: Dr Iwa Zielinska-Pocwiardowska: https://www.thisjungiancoach.com/
I should start this review with a confession: I’m a little envious of Mariana Louis for writing this book. In the autumn of 2025, I began work on my own book bringing Jungian psychology and tarot together, so when TABI sent me Louis’s title to review, I felt a small pang of jealousy — especially once I realised it’s genuinely a very good book. There, I said it. Ground cleared — let’s turn to Louis and her work.
I’ve known Mariana Louis for a few years now through her Instagram presence (Archetypal Tarot) and through Persephone’s Sister, where she has consistently taught her audience how to bring tarot and Jungian psychology together. Louis uses the cards to illuminate her clients’ inner lives, and teaches others to use them for self-knowledge — as a mirror.
Tarot and the Psychology of the Soul is the fruit of years of research and practice. Its central aim is to show that tarot is a natural companion to depth psychology — to the exploration of the unconscious and the building of a more conscious life. As a Jungian coach who has long used tarot cards, among other tools, to work with clients’ unconscious material, I couldn’t agree more.
M. Louis’s book and earlier work linking Jung and tarot
This is not the first book to bring Jungian theory into conversation with tarot. The earlier works of this kind appeared in the 1980s. The pioneer is a Jungian analyst, Sallie Nichols, whose Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey (1980) remains foundational — though it deals with the Major Arcana alone. Rachel Pollack also drew heavily on depth psychology in 78 Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness (1980), widely regarded as the “bible” of modern tarot. Mary K. Greer’s Tarot for Yourself: A Workbook for Personal Transformation (1984) deserves mention too — a landmark practical guide, one of the first to shift the emphasis away from traditional “fortune-telling” and toward psychological work with projection, the unconscious, and archetype through journalling and original exercises. Robert Wang’s The Jungian Tarot and Its Archetypal Imagery (1988), grounded in the Golden Dawn tradition, is another key reference point. In the decades since, more work has followed, much of it focused on a single facet of depth psychology — Shadow work, for instance.
Mariana Louis’s book is, I believe, the first full-length publication to comprehensively bring together all three parts of the tarot deck — Major Arcana, Minor Arcana, and Court Cards — with the theory and practice of depth psychology, offering a reading of every card in both upright and reversed positions from the same consistent lens: psychological functions, archetypes, complexes, Shadow work. One important note: Louis builds her framework on the Waite-Smith tarot deck.
The book opens by laying out the basic vocabulary of depth psychology — archetype, the Self, the unconscious, etc. It then turns to the Minor Arcana, read through Jung’s psychological functions and the Hero’s Journey, before moving to the Major Arcana through the lens of individuation. The final section offers practical guidance for working with the cards from a depth-psychological standpoint, along with a set of archetypal spreads.
Where the book is strongest
Let’s start with what works best. Louis’s strongest proposition is her pairing of the individuation process — broadly, the process of becoming a whole, integrated person by bringing consciousness and the unconscious into relationship — with the Major Arcana. Devoting nearly half the book to this, Louis builds a genuinely persuasive case, worked out down to the smallest detail. Unlike Pollack and Nichols, who both divide the Major Arcana into three stages of the Fool’s journey, Louis divide the trumps into four groups. The first six cards (1–6) compose “The Primordial Powers” – archetypal Masculine and Feminine principles. “with these cards we are navigating the central dualities of our existences”(p. 143) – says the author. The proper individuation only begins with the Chariot (trump VII), and it is characterised by three stages: Birth of Selfhood (VII-XI); Encountering the Shadow (XII-XVI) and Approaching Wholeness (XVII-0).
She works through each trump in careful, consistent detail, treating it as a further stage, challenge, or possibility on the path of individuation. Her reading of the Fool is particularly original — not as the one undergoing individuation, but as its final realisation. The research behind this section clearly runs deep; it’s enriched throughout by alchemical and artistic illustrations highlighting tarot’s wider symbolic correspondences. I found this proposal genuinely exciting, and I intend to draw on it myself in the Heroine’s Journey workshops I’ve been running for several years.
The section on the Court Cards is also very strong — it focuses on practical work with complexes, understood as an aspect of the Shadow, offering a much more approachable way of getting to know the Court Cards than many other books, which often unnecessarily overcomplicate matters.
Where the book is less successful
Not everything in the book is equally convincing.
One of the more interesting, if not entirely successful, ideas is Louis’s reading of the Minor Arcana 1–10 through Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, popularly known as the Hero’s Journey. Applying the Hero’s Journey to tarot isn’t new in itself — it’s most often used for the Major Arcana, as in R. Pollack (as the Fool’s journey) or S. Nichols. Mariana Louis does something different: she treats the Major Arcana as an individuation process unfolding over a long span — a lifetime, perhaps — within which several hero’s journeys can take place, while the Minor Arcana becomes the Hero’s Journey applied to different life domains: love (Cups), career (Pentacles), values (Wands), worldview (Swords). I like the ambition of this — it’s an original project. But I don’t think she quite manages to make the monomyth’s structure fit the pip cards convincingly. This shows most clearly at the tens. For Campbell, the final stage of the journey is “freedom to live” — a maturity that comes from grasping the inseparability of spirit and matter, reason and magic (in the language of Eastern philosophy: non-duality). But in the Waite-Smith tarot deck not every suit visually represents that freedom: Swords and Wands depict clear defeat, while the other two suits offer a happy ending. Why should the Cups and Pentacles path end joyfully and triumphantly for the hero, while the Swords and Wands paths end in sadness and failure? Louis’s explanation doesn’t convince me — the hero’s monomyth always resolves the same way; it doesn’t have different endings built in.
To be fair, the system of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life runs into a similar problem, in my opinion. It struggles to explain the differences in how the tenth sephira, Malkuth, becomes realised in matter — which suggests the difficulty lies in the existing systems themselves, not only in Louis’s proposal. The only explanation I’ve found remotely satisfying is one based on dividing the elements into passive/receptive (Water and Earth) and active/extreme (Air and Fire). On that reading, the ten doesn’t signify “reward or punishment” but simply the natural saturation point of a given quality.
Louis’s other major proposal is to pair the four tarot suits with Jung’s four psychological functions (thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition). Other authors have attempted this too. The hardest call, in my view, is matching Feeling and Intuition to the right suits. Authors split roughly into two camps: those who pair Feeling with Cups (Mary Greer), and those who pair it with Wands (Robert Place). I’ve wrestled with this dilemma myself when working on this topic in my book and ultimately concluded that Wands fit better. But Louis pairs Feeling with Cups — and I’m not convinced: Feeling, as a function, is oriented toward action and valuation, which Cups don’t quite capture. What’s more, Intuition is closely tied to the unconscious, and as the great Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz observed, water — which in tarot means Cups — is the primary symbol of the unconscious.
It’s also worth noting what the book leaves out: Louis doesn’t engage with astrology or with the Kabbalistic Tree of Life as popularised by the Golden Dawn. That’s the right call — the Golden Dawn system can’t be done justice briefly, so leaving it out was wise. This doesn’t mean the two approaches are incompatible, though. For readers who work primarily with Golden Dawn correspondences and/or the Tree of Life, Louis’s approach could serve as a rich complement and a way of deepening their existing tarot practice — especially given that the early esoteric approach to the cards, which took shape in the eighteenth century, was arguably pursuing the same goal depth psychology would later take up: self-knowledge and the pursuit of wholeness.
Who is this book for?
I suspect Louis would like anyone to be able to pick it up, regardless of their prior knowledge of depth psychology or tarot. In practice, though, readers with no grounding in either may find it heavy going at first — some basic orientation in the structure of the deck, the distinction between Major and Minor Arcana, and their respective roles will help. The readers who stand to gain the most are those already familiar with the basics of depth psychology who want to see it brought into conversation with tarot — along with anyone drawn to a more intuitive approach to the cards, independent of correspondences with astrology, the Tree of Life, or the Hebrew alphabet.
The publisher markets this book as “scholarly and soulful” — and it earns that description. Louis writes beautifully, with depth and a genuinely poetic touch (no small feat when writing about Jung’s ideas), while remaining accessible. She does something genuinely difficult well: translating complicated theory into clear, simple language. Her erudition shows throughout: the references to philosophers and spiritual guides underline just how interdisciplinary tarot really is — not a tool for predicting the future, but a language of the psyche.
One last, practical note: the book closes with a bibliography and an index — a small thing, but a genuinely useful one, and something tarot books all too often skip. Anyone wanting to look up a specific card, concept, or reference will be grateful for it.
Author Bio:
Mariana Louis is widely recognised as one of the foremost voices in educating tarot enthusiasts on the psycho-spiritual power of the cards. She is also a faculty member of the Jung Archademy, an esteemed online educational platform with a select faculty of Jungian analysts and vetted depth psychology scholars. Her writings and reflection on psycho-spiritual growth have been featured in online magazines such as Thought Catalog, Soul Anatomy, and The Cut, and her prose and poetry have been published in Luna Luna Magazine and Sixfold Magazine and have appeared in the music of acclaimed composer Gary Schall. Her greatest work remains her teaching, where she has guided countless students via her platform Persephone’s Sister in subjects such as witchcraft and Jungian theory, tarot and shadow work, and images of the archetypal Feminine. She is also cohost of Soror Mystica, a podcast elucidating the world’s most mystifying symbols. Mariana is a native New Yorker based in Queens and lives with her husband, two cats, and perpetually expanding book collection. You can find Mariana Louis on Instagram @persephonessister, and on her YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@PersephonesSister
Tarot and the Psychology of the Soul: Exploring the Archetypal Mirrors of the Psyche is now available for purchase here: https://redwheelweiser.com/book/tarot-and-the-psychology-of-the-soul-9781578638987/ and from all good online bookstores.
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