Soul Signs is a book by Rosemary Altea, a spiritual medium and healer, that proposes a system of soul typing: the idea that the soul carries consistent traits and attributes across lifetimes, and that understanding those traits can help explain patterns in your current life. Whether or not you share the metaphysical premise, the self-knowledge work it generates is genuinely useful.
The framework
Altea's system organises souls into five primary energy groups, each with distinct characteristics, tendencies, and challenges:
- Earth signs: strategic, grounded, practical. Drawn to structure and order. Can struggle with rigidity or over-control.
- Air signs: passive, charming, social. Drawn to connection and harmony. Can struggle with conflict avoidance or people-pleasing.
- Water signs: compromising, adaptable, persistent. Drawn to flow and cooperation. Can struggle with losing themselves in others.
- Fire signs: emotional, changeable, passionate. Drawn to intensity and transformation. Can struggle with consistency or emotional regulation.
- Sulfur signs: the dark sign, complex and contradictory. Often carry significant inner conflict alongside great capacity.
Within each group there are soul subtypes: the Retrospective soul (strong-willed, perfectionist, emotionally driven), the Bright Star (vivacious, quick-witted, radiant), the Traveler (romantic, thrill-seeking, restless), and others. The combinations create a detailed portrait of soul-level tendencies that show up consistently regardless of circumstances.
Why it sits in Taha Wairua
Soul Signs belongs here because it operates at the level of wairua: the spiritual dimension of self that exists independently of the physical, mental, and social. It asks not "what have you done?" or "what do you feel?" but "who are you, at your most essential?" That is a Wairua question.
In concussion recovery, when roles, capacities, and identities are disrupted, this level of self can feel like the last thing standing. Connecting to a sense of who you are at your core, something that predates the injury and is not defined by what you can currently do, can be quietly steadying.
How to work with it
The book itself requires real contemplation. It is not a quick read-and-categorise experience. Altea suggests, and I found this essential, taking time with each section and sitting with the resonance rather than rushing to a conclusion. The typing is not self-assessed in a straightforward way: it emerges through reflection, and sometimes through asking people who know you well how they would describe you.
If you want support working through it, a coach or therapist familiar with the framework can help. Working one-on-one allowed me to go much deeper than I would have alone.
I did five weeks of one-on-one coaching sessions with Jo Devane from Soul Sanctuary, working through Soul Signs bit by bit. That structure was invaluable because the book requires a lot of contemplation and reflection, and having someone to work through it with made it much richer than doing it alone.
One of the things Altea recommends is asking people close to you to write down a list of attributes and describe you as they experience you. I asked three people. Reading what they wrote was confronting and illuminating in equal measure. Seeing yourself through people who know you well, without the filter of your own self-criticism, is a different kind of mirror.
What Soul Signs helped me do was connect to who I am at my very core. It helped me understand why I sometimes flip between seeming selfless and seeming selfish, why being organised and orderly matters so much to me, and why certain things drain me that other people seem unbothered by. Those patterns had always been there. Soul Signs gave me a framework for understanding them rather than judging them.
I hold it as one of several frameworks rather than the definitive answer. Alongside values work, Sparketypes, and the how questions, it contributed to a much clearer picture of who I actually am, which in the middle of identity grief was exactly what I needed.