Death: 13
Astrological correspondence: Scorpio
Kabbalistic letter: 
Nun
Path on Tree of Life: Tipheret (Beauty) to Netzach (Victory)
Thou knowest ’tis common, all that live must die, Passing through nature to eternity.
Hamlet
The Death card has become something of a cliché in Tarot, or rather two clichés, the first in popular culture, the second among Tarot readers. In movies, the Tarot tends to appear in thrillers that want a touch of the supernatural. A reader will set out the cards for a frightened client, and sure enough, there comes Death, with swelling music and (the producers hope) a gasp from the audience. A few years ago, a serial killer—the “DC sniper”—left a Marseille Death card near one or two of his murders. Maybe he hoped Hollywood would make a movie about him.
Death cards from Visconti, Marseille, Rider, Golden Dawn Ritual, Egyptian & Shining Tribe
For Tarot readers, the cliché goes in the opposite direction. As soon as the card appears on the table, we say something like, “This card does not mean anybody’s about to die. It means the end of something, with the chance for something new to emerge.” It’s probably good to say this. Most times, the Death card does not mean an unexpected death, and even if we accept that it might, do we really want to predict that? What effect might it have? And suppose you were wrong? What suffering might you cause for the sake of a dramatic moment in a reading? Sometimes, as Tarot readers, we can fall into the trap of wanting our predictions to come out, no matter the disaster in people’s lives. It excites us to think, “He said he was healthy, but I saw death in his cards, and two weeks later, bam, he keeled over with a heart attack.” We would prefer the story run, “I told him to get to the doctor, and the doctor detected an aneurysm. They got it just in time.” A happy ending is best, but either way we can hold our heads high as psychics. And yet, most modern readers consider it better not to go there at all. And so we tell our querents, and ourselves, that Death does not mean death.
Let’s see what the tradition says.
Some Death Meanings
Excerpted from Mystical Origins of the Tarot by Paul Huson.
Pratesi’s Cartomancer (1750): Death.
De Mellet (1781): Death.
Court de Gébelin (1773-82): Death.
(Do we begin to see a pattern here?)
Lévi (1855): The Hebrew letter Mem. Death. The Heaven of Jupiter and Mars, domination and force, new birth, creation and destruction.
Christian (1870): Arcanum XIII. The Scythe: Transformation. In the divine world, the perpetual moment of creation, destruction and renewal; in the intellectual world the ascent of the Spirit into the divine spheres; in the physical world death, that is, the transformation of human nature on reaching the end of its organic period.
Mathers (1888): Death, change, transformation, alteration for the worse. Reversed: Death just escaped, partial change, alteration for the better.
Golden Dawn (1888-96): The Child of the Great Transformers, Lord of the Gates of Death. Death, time, transformation, change, sometimes destruction, but only if borne out by the cards with it.
Grand Orient (Waite, 1889, 1909): Death, transforming force, destruction.
Waite (1910): Death. End, mortality, destruction, corruption. Also, for a man, the loss of a benefactor; for a woman, many obstacles; for an unmarried woman, failure of marriage prospects. Reversed: Inertia, sleep, lethargy, petrification, hope destroyed.
Lévi introduces the idea of “new birth,” but it’s not really until Paul Christian and MacGregor Mathers that we see the concept of “transformation.” And even then, it still means actual death. And notice how Waite, usually the one who brings in subtle and spiritual meanings, sounds the direct note: “Death. End, mortality, destruction, corruption.”
So, should Tarot readers return to the Death card as prediction of someone dying? I still think of this as a bad practice to follow generally, but I also think we need to respect the long- held opinion of tradition. If the card and your own psychic sense tell you that this is what it means, see if the cards around it give you further clues, and then see how you can speak about it in a way that supports what the person will go through. If you are uncertain, or if you think it’s death but have no idea who or when, it’s better not to bring it up. In that case, it’s better to stay with the theme of endings and change, and perhaps talk about death as part of that theme.
Sometimes the card points to death as an issue in people’s lives. If the querent’s relative or friend has recently died or is terminally ill, or if the querent works in a hospice or (as happened in a reading once) is working on treatments for a deadly disease, then the Death card will mean the significance of death, and the other cards can help guide the person toward a better understanding of it.
Moving away from the literal—it may mean the death of a marriage, or a job, or a long-held belief. It is not always sad, for it can lead to liberation or new beginnings—but don’t assume it’s easy. In an earlier book, using the therapy model for the middle line of the Major Arcana, I gave the example of someone who enters therapy to change a lifelong habit. Often, people will understand the issues fairly early, after six months or so, and yet they continue in their old patterns for much longer. They fear death. I originally thought of this because of a friend who was trying to lose weight. “I’ve been a fat person all my life,” she said. “If I lose weight, I won’t exist.” This is death not of the body but of the ego, the definition of who and what we are. And even when we desire it, it’s not easy. For of course she was right. The person she was—whom she knew how to be—would no longer exist.
We all fear death, we all resist it from deep in our psyches. Our very cells want to live. Never underestimate how instinctively we fight death. We can understand this in evolutionary terms. Early humans who did not fear death probably got killed before they had a chance to reproduce and pass on those fearless genes. Those with a deep fear of death avoided it long enough to have children. And yet, if we want to grow, especially spiritually, there comes a time when we must get past that ingrained fear. For one thing, we will all die sooner or later. Thalassa, organizer of the Bay Area Tarot Symposium, laughs when she reads of the “death rate” going up or down. “The death rate’s the same as it’s always been,” she says, “one per person.”
There is another reason to get past the fear of dying. Fear narrows our ability to open to existence itself, to open the heart and see the wonders of existence.
The fear of death surrounds the Death card with superstition (including those movies with dire fortune tellers). The card almost always bears the number thirteen, but in most older decks it has no title, as if to name it might invite it.
Why is thirteen, especially Friday the thirteenth, so unlucky? I used to think it a Christian tradition—Christ was crucified on a Friday, with Judas the thirteenth person at the Last Supper. Apparently, Rome in general executed people on Fridays. Consider also that there are twelve signs in the zodiac (and twelve gods on Mt. Olympus), and so thirteen goes beyond the ordered, known universe. And what might lie beyond the twelve signs? Death.
While the fear may go back thousands of years, some give it a more recent origin: Friday, October 13, 1307. On that day, the church and the King of France destroyed the Knights Templars and arrested their leader, Jacques de Molay.
But thirteen goes to something deeper. A lunar cycle lasts approximately 28–29 days, which is also the length of time of most women’s menstrual cycle. This creates thirteen months in a year. Thirteen therefore signifies mysteries of the moon, lunacy, the feminine. The Inquisition identified the moon with witchcraft and identified thirteen with supposed orgies of witches and demons. Some modern witches take a much more positive view of the link of thirteen and witches, requiring thirteen members for a traditional coven.
The moon’s thirteen cycles remind us of death and rebirth. Unlike the steady, dependable sun, the moon dies, goes through three days of darkness, and is born again, only to become old and weak once more and fade until finally, once again, it dies.
Death comes in the middle of what is possibly the most powerful triad, Lovers-Death-Judgement. Love, death, and resurrection, the great story. We give ourselves to love in this world, and if we are lucky it is received, but what really matters is that we give love with passion and commitment. And then death comes and ends everything. But if we can hear the trumpet blast of the angel within us, we can understand that love extends beyond all our limited perceptions. In my structure of the Major Arcana, the sixth position shows us a powerful experience we get when we make our way through the challenges of the middle group of three cards. The Wheel of Fortune showed us a vision of fate, or karma, or any of the other names for the essential mystery of events and the turns of our lives. In Justice, we open ourselves to truly look at who we are to balance the scales. And in the Hanged Man, we attach ourselves to the ever-flowing Tree of Life. What comes next is Death.
Death is always what comes next. Somehow we need to accept this, not just intellectually but within our being. We die so that other creatures may come to life. Literally. Dead creatures feed the living, and the remains fertilize the earth. And further … if we could perpetually clone ourselves—make identical copies, like amoebae, who reproduce by splitting into two genetic replicas of the original—we would never end. But nothing new would ever emerge either.
Death came into the world with sex. When organisms became male and female and reproduced sexually, they could mix their genes to create offspring that were like their parents but not the same as them. And so the parents died, unlike the amoebae who live forever as long as they can keep splitting into two copies. Sex and death are really one thing. And resurrection—of one kind or another—comes into the world with death. For how can you be reborn if you don’t die?
Representations of Demeter and Persephone show them almost exactly alike, the daughter a copy of the mother. When Death—Hades—comes in his chariot, driven by sexual desire, everything changes. Among other things, we get the death and rebirth of nature in the turning of the seasons, and plant life, which dies and comes back to life.
Who knows what really happens after death? Hierophants of all sorts assure us they know, but the details always vary. Why believe any of them? Have they died and sent back messages? The great magician Harry Houdini told his friends he would do everything he could to contact them on Halloween, some Halloween, after his death. By all accounts, it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe next October 31. Maybe with you.
Some traditions urge us not to concern ourselves with death. The Torah, the five books of Moses, remarkably contains no concept of an afterlife. The idea of a “world to come” does not emerge until the prophets. Zen Buddhism suggests we pay attention to “right now” and not worry about “later on.” And yet we cannot escape death, just as we cannot escape the fear of it, and so the Mystery rituals and tribal initiations confront their candidates with death so that they may “die before they die” and discover their eternal selves. Temperance, the card after Death, gives us a vision of that eternal self in the image of a calm angel.
The Marseille Death shows a skeleton with a scythe, reaping a harvest of heads and hands and feet—the head for the ego, the limbs for our activity in the physical world. In most versions, the heads wear crowns, for like the medieval Wheel of Fortune crushing a proud king, the image conveys the idea that even kings must die. The Visconti Death carries a bow instead of a scythe, as if he strikes from afar, a possible reference to the Plague that had wiped out one-third of the European population in the century before.
Dr. Waite radically changed the image, so that we see Death like a knight in black armor carrying a white rose banner, symbol of the Rosicrucian Mystery tradition. Four people confront the figure. A king, symbol of the proud and resistant ego, lies dead. A bishop stands in prayer, held up by doctrine and faith. A maiden turns away her face, for in adolescence we become self-aware, and the ego begins to fear its destruction. A child, symbol of openness, greets Death with flowers instead of fear. Paul Foster Case criticized Waite for this card, for a particular reason. The bishop’s mitre, shaped like the mouth of a fish, links the card to the Age of Pisces, the astrological symbol of the fish. In our time, however, we have begun to shift into a “new age,” or Aeon, the Age of Aquarius (for more on this idea, see the Wheel of Fortune and Judgement). The mysteries of Death, Case argues, carry through all ages.
Death is the final card to have a numerological triad (along with the Wheel, Justice, and the Hanged Man). If we consider the Fool as card 22, then 2+2=4, and 1+3 also equals 4.Thus we get the Emperor and the Fool, power and innocence, with Death between them.
We have already considered the difficult moments when Death turns up in a reading. Does it predict actual death? Probably not, though we need to consider death as an issue, especially if someone has died or is dying, or if the person works with death in some way. Some of the Swords cards might emphasize death, especially (in the Rider deck) the Three, the Four, the Six, the Nine, or the Ten. Traditionally the Ten of Pentacles can mean an inheritance, so the combination of that card and Death might indicate the death of a relative.
Very often Death means the end of something—a marriage that has run its course, a job the person needs to quit, a long project that comes to an end. What matters is what we do with this situation. Do we resist, deny, accept? If the Tower appears as well, the change might happen very abruptly, with possibilities of violence.
Sometimes in a reading we want to make a person feel better. We say that the Death card means rebirth, or change, or a new beginning. Actually, it means death. Something ends, and one way or another, it will feel like dying. Good things may come, but first we need to accept the end of what had existed. Even if something unpleasant dies, such as a painful relationship, we still may grieve for the loss of what we have known, how we have defined ourselves.
Death reversed can mean the holding back of death. If someone has been sick a long time, with fear of not surviving, the upside-down Death may say that the person will not die soon or in the immediate future. It does not, however, promise recovery, just that life continues. The reversed Death card may indicate resistance to change, inertia. Things do not die, they simply go on. This, too, can bring a reassurance if not a resolution.
A Death Wisdom Reading
1. What is Death?
2. Where does it come from?
3. What causes it?
4. Why do we have to die?
5. What comes from Death?
6. What will come after?
7. What does it mean in a reading?
A Death Personal Reading
1. What is my attitude to Death?
2. How am I okay with it?
3. How do I have trouble with it?
4. What needs to die in my life?
5. How do I let it die?
6. What needs to live?
7. How do I help it live?