Death rides not as an end but as transformation, the great harvester that clears the field for new growth. End, mortality, destruction, corruption: the necessary conditions for rebirth. The Self dying to be reborn through novel desire, the old skin shed so the new flesh can breathe. Death tells us, over time, that Life is really a series of embracings of New Flesh. Reversed: Inertia, sleep, lethargy, petrifaction, somnambulism. The refusal to die when dying is required.

UPRIGHT: End, Mortality, Destruction, Corruption

REVERSED: Inertia, Sleep, Lethargy, Petrifaction

The Death card is one of the more ominous pulls from the Tarot. You may initially assume the omen is as grave as it looks; what does any creature fear more than death? Are not all fears forms of little-death fright? ∵ ‘What if everything ends’? Well, everything IS ending. Death is a card that you must face with conviction. Take pride in your mortality! Yes, personas die, seasons change, time moves on. The Death card means change is on the way, one way or another. Upon closer inspection, it is easy to see how Death empowers life by forcing it to evolve, and equating all things under the sun in the long-range name of transience. 

On the journey, the hero must delve into the deepest cave, face his nemesis, and integrate his shadow, becoming a new person in the process…{Kill the boy ∵ Make the man.}

Bottom Line: When you draw Death, prepare to transform {or be transformed}.

Tree of Life Path: Tiphareth to Netzach -- Beauty ⟷ Victory. The heart of creation must seek out an ending, glorious or putrefying in nature, in order to consummate itself.

A.E. Waite quote: “The natural transit of man to the next stage of his being either is or may be one form of his progress, but the exotic and almost unknown entrance, while still in this life, into the state of mystical death is a change in the form of consciousness and the passage into a state to which ordinary death is neither the path nor gate. The existing occult explanations of the 13th card are, on the whole, better than usual: rebirth, creation, destination, renewal, and the rest.”

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